the general waste. The butterworts
are beauties, and true children of the spring. I picked my first ones,
which by chance were of the smaller purple species (_Pinguicula
pumila_), on my way down from the woods, on a moist bank. At that moment
a white man came up the road. "What do you call this flower?" said I.
"Valentine's flower," he answered at once. "Ah," said I, "because it is
in bloom on St. Valentine's Day, I suppose?" "No, sir," he said. "Do you
speak Spanish?" I had to shake my head. "Because I could explain it
better in Spanish," he continued, as if by way of apology; but he went
on in perfectly good English: "If you put one of them under your pillow,
and think of some one you would like very much to see,--some one who has
been dead a long time,--you will be likely to dream of him. It is a very
pretty flower," he added. And so it is; hardly prettier, however, to my
thinking, than the blossoms of the early creeping blackberry (_Rubus
trivialis_). With them I fairly fell in love: true white roses, I called
them, each with its central ring of dark purplish stamens; as beautiful
as the cloudberry, which once, ten years before, I had found, on the
summit of Mount Clinton, in New Hampshire, and refused to believe a
_Rubus_, though Dr. Gray's key led me to that genus again and again.
There _is_ something in a name, say what you will.

Some weeks later, and a little farther south,--in the flat-woods behind
New Smyrna,--I saw other flowers, but never anything of that tropical
exuberance at which the average Northern tourist expects to find himself
staring. Boggy places were full of blue iris (the common _Iris
versicolor_ of New England, but of ranker growth), and here and there a
pool was yellow with bladderwort. I was taken also with the larger and
taller (yellow) butterwort, which I used never to see as I went through
the woods in the morning, but was sure to find standing in the tall dry
grass along the border of the sandy road, here one and there one, on my
return at noon. In similar places grew a "yellow daisy" (_Leptopoda_), a
single big head, of a deep color, at the top of a leafless stem. It
seemed to be one of the most abundant of Florida spring flowers, but I
could not learn that it went by any distinctive vernacular name. Beside
the railway track were blue-eyed grass and pipewort, and a dainty blue
lobelia (_L. Feayana_), with once in a while an extremely pretty
coreopsis, having a purple centre, and scarcely