In the hot July and August, the scarlet lobelia, the cardinal-flower, is to be found.  Never was cardinal so robed.  If Herbert’s rose, in poetic hyperbole, with its “hue angry and brave, bids the rash gazer wipe his eye,” certainly such a bed of lobelia as I once saw on the road to “Rollo’s Camp” was anything but what the Scotch would call “a sight for sair een.”  For the space of a dozen or twenty yards grew a patch of absolutely nothing but lobelia.  At a little distance it was like a scarlet carpet flung out by the roadside.  If you desire to twine the threefold chord of color, as Mr. Ruskin calls it, I know of no lovelier foil for the lobelia than the white orchis, which haunts the same marshy spots.  Those long spikes of feathery and balanced blossoms are the most absolute white of anything in Nature.  They positively insist upon the very refinement of purity, as you look at them.

Did you ever see a pond-lily?—­not the miserable draggled green-and-mud-colored buds which enterprising boys bring into the cars for sale; but the white water-lily, floating on the silent brooks, or far out in the safe depths of the mill-ponds.  The “Autocrat” knows what pond-lilies are, having visited Prospero’s Isle and seen the pink-tinged sisterhood of a certain mere that lies embosomed in its hills.  But to know them, you must hunt for them,—­tramp off to the distant stream, and then, not stand on the bank and wish and sigh, but off hose and shoon, and, careless of water-snake and snapping-turtle, wade in up to their virgin bower, and bear off the dripping, fragrant prize.  None but the brave deserve—­lady or lily.

But if the stream be too deep and wide, and the lilies are anchored far out among their broad pads,—­a floral Venice, with the blue spikes and arrowy leaves of the pickerel-weed for campaniles and towers,—­there are yet “lilies of the field” over which you may profitably meditate, remembering that Solomon Ben-David was not so arrayed.  Two kinds there are,—­one like the tiger-lily of the gardens, the petals curled back and showing the whole leopard-spotted corolla,—­the other bell-shaped, rarer, and growing one only on a stalk.  Both are to be found in open spaces, bush-grown fields, and airy, sunny spots.  It is worth a hot and dusty June walk to get into one of those nooks.  You can spend days and not exhaust the study which one little triangular bit of overgrown pasture affords,—­spend them, not as a naturalist in close, patient study, because to such a one a square yard of moss is as exhaustless as the forests of Guiana to a Waterton, but as a nemophilist, taking simple delight in mere observation and individual discovery.

  “Many haps fall in the field
  Seldom seen by watchful eyes.”

And so all sorts of curious ways are discoverable by the mere wood-lounger.  At one time your way is barred by the great portcullis of the strong threaded web of the field spider, who sits like a porter in king’s livery of black and gold at his gate.  Then you have a peep into the winding maelstroem-funnel of another of the spider family.  Poe must have suffered metempsychosis into the body of a blue-bottle, when he wrote his “Descent into the Maelstroem”; for such an insect, hanging midway down that treacherous, sticky descent, and seeing Death creeping up from the bottom to grasp him, might have a clear idea of what was undergone by the fisherman of Lofoden.