constant rains kept it in a
muddy, treacherous condition. I remember still the undignified and
uncomfortable celerity with which, on one occasion, I took my seat in
what was little better than the rocky bed of a brook, such a place as I
should by no means have selected for the purpose had I been granted even
a single moment for deliberation.

"Hills draw like heaven" (as applied to some of us, it may be feared
that this is rather an under-statement), and it could not have been more
than fifteen minutes after I landed from the Lady of the Lake--the "Old
Lady," as one of the fishermen irreverently called her--before I was on
my way to the summit.

I was delighted then, as I was afterwards, whenever I entered the woods,
with the extraordinary profusion and variety of the ferns. Among the
rest, and one of the most abundant, was the beautiful _Cystopteris
bulbifera_; its long, narrow, pale green, delicately cut, Dicksonia-like
fronds bending toward the ground at the tip, as if about to take root
for a new start, in the walking-fern's manner. Some of these could not
have been less than four feet in length (including the stipe), and I
picked one which measured about two feet and a half, and bore
twenty-five bulblets underneath. Half a mile from the start, or
thereabouts, the path skirts what I should call the fernery; a circular
space, perhaps one hundred and fifty feet in diameter, set in the midst
of the primeval forest, but itself containing no tree or shrub of any
sort,--nothing but one dense mass of ferns. In the centre was a patch of
the sensitive fern (Onoclea sensibilis), while around this, and filling
nearly the entire circle, was a magnificent thicket of the ostrich fern
(_Onoclea struthiopteris_), with _sensibilis_ growing hidden and
scattered underneath. About the edge were various other species, notably
_Aspidium Goldianum_, which I here found for the first time, and
_Aspidium aculeatum_, var. _Braunii_. All in all, it was a curious and
pretty sight,--this tiny tarn filled with ferns instead of water,--one
worth going a good distance to see, and sure to attract the notice of
the least observant traveler.[26]

Ferns are mostly of a gregarious habit. Here at Owl's Head, for
instance, might be seen in one place a rock thickly matted with the
common polypody; in another a patch of the maiden-hair; in still another
a plenty of the Christmas fern, or a smaller group of one of the beech
ferns (_Phegopteris polypodioid