large, loose, airy, white spike, its long streamer-like white lips, its taper greenish wings, and very long curving spurs, twisting and crossing each other in a sort of zigzag pattern; above all, there is the pure sweet scent, which is more charming in the evening. It always seems like a lady of the woods. It is also called the honeysuckle orchis, because of its delicious smell, a good deal like a honeysuckle; and the two-leaved orchis, because half way up the stem grow a pair of oval leaves, spreading one on each side. These are not true leaves, only bracts, and you see they have not the branching mid-rib and network, but have the long ribbon-like veins going lengthways, as those growing from the root have,—like the lily and grass kind, and all the plants which have but one cotyledon, and shoot up in sheaths. These are the most frequent of the true orchises, all of which have spurs. The other families of this tribe are without spurs, though other parts of the structure resemble those already described, and very curious some of them are. The tway-blade, so called from having two such oval leaves as the butterfly orchis, grows in much the same places, but is not of the same fleshy substance. It has a four-cleft lip, that seems to hang out the sign of the little green man, with its two arms and two legs and yellow head; but this is not near so like as the man-tway-blade, properly so called, is said to be. Of this, however, I cannot judge, since I never saw it. The bird's nest orchis is a very strange plant, growing under beech trees, which allow scarcely anything else to come near them in their strong desire to keep their domain tidy and allow no litter under their branches; but this little plant comes up under the lordly shade of their arching boughs, nay, even close to their smooth univied trunks; and, as if to elude their observation, it wears the livery of their own dead leaves, and while in its full prime is as brownblossom, stem, and all, as if it had been dead for months. As to leaves, it attempts none; it is only glad to find sufferance for its brown petals in the deep glades of the beech wood. In dry pastures grow the lady's tresses, a pretty little low plant with blossoms, where the wings are pure white and the lip green, the flowers twisting in a spiral line round the spike, and I suppose owing their name to their way of growth being in the line of the waves of a lady's hair. I fancy this must be the flower that village children's rhyme means— "Daffodils and daisies, Rosemary and tresses, Must curtsey to the ladies; The bushes so high, the bushes so low, Please, my lady, stoop under the bough!" Four little girls The children always say 66 traisies," but as there is no such word I suspect it once meant tresses. Do you know the game the rhyme belongs to? stand together, the arms of two crossed over those of the other pair, and sing it together; when they come to the curtseying, they all curtsey, and at the stooping under the bough the under pair bend beneath the arms of the others, and come within, so as to be enclosed between them, and then they all jump till they can hold together no longer. I don't know whether you can understand this description, so we will go back to the lady's tresses. If you find them at all it will be in quantities; but the strange thing is, that though they are not annual, and grow in ground by no means liable to be disturbed, they show their faces only now and then; they will come up one year and not be seen again for four or five, or else make their appearance on some lawn where no one ever expected them. Helleborine has long leaves and bracts, and a prettily jagged lip. The broad-leaved kind grows in dry woods; the marsh helleborine has a white under-lip, jagged and edged with red; the large white helleborine, a great beauty, looks at first sight like a lily, but is not common. I have kept to the last the choicest English orchideous plants, the ophrys kind, the lip of which is arranged as if for the very purpose of affording us sport in forms like those of insects. Prettiest of all is the bee ophrys, its downy, velvety, curved lip, dark brown mottled with yellow, and its pale lilac wings, streaked with green, affording a most curious likeness of a bee about to settle on a flower. They are just sufficiently rare to make the discovery of them delightful. I shall never forget the ecstacy of my first sight of one, on a mossy bank, in a little copsewood dell, two bees full out, and another just coming; it was a scream of joy indeed with which I flew at it. A few more I have found; the best mine of them was an old chalk pit, now destroyed, and now and then they are met with in dry pastures; but I suspect them of the caprices of my lady's tresses, for where I find them one year it is almost certain that there they will not be the next. The fly ophrys I have but once seen, and then it was not growing, but freshly gathered. It looked like a housefly cut out of dark puce velvet, a blue spot on its back, and, if I remember right, with jet black eyes. The spider ophrys I have never seen. But these wonders of our own do not approach to what may be seen in foreign lands, especially in South America. There grows a plant, looked on and named in the same spirit as the passion flower, as another stamp and token of the Christian faith, set by the hands of its Author, the beautiful orchid called by the Spaniards of Panama the Espiritu Santo, because it is just like a hovering dove of the purest white, a fit emblem indeed for Whit-Sunday. Another dove orchis grows there likewise, a large tall plant, with flowers like a white dove on her nest, her head turned back and her wings slightly raised and touched with purple. Another orchid is like a whole shower of pale purple and white butterflies, coming down from a bough, and this, like many of the tribe, is a parasite, that is, it grows on the limbs of trees, like mistletoe; while there is another kind more like sticks of coral than anything else, the whole plant being of the most glowing scarlet, except the flowers, which are deep purple. These four I have seen in hot-houses, and marvelled at; there are many more that are grown in the same manner in England, and that a few lucky people are able to go and admire, but what must they not be in their own home? Some grow from the earth, some hang down from the trees, some sit on rocks amid moss, some beautify the decaying and fallen trees, and their perfume fills the woods at night. Their forms are beyond everything astonishing. The monkey, the mosquito, the ant, are only a few of them; there are hovering birds and every wondrous shape, so that travellers declare that the lifetime of an artist would be too short to give pictures of all the kinds that inhabit the valleys of Peru alone. CHAPTER XXXVIII FLAGS WHEN France was true and loyal, and her sovereign gloried in the title of "Most Christian King," her banner was the same as that of these green hosts; and St. Louis led his Crusade beneath the waving fleur-de-lys, and wore it marked on his robe and on his shield, seeing in its threefold formation an emblem of the highest mystery of the Christian faith. I cannot say that it was well represented in those days; and the thing with three points carved in stone, or represented in gold on a blue ground, which we call the "fleur-de-lys," though graceful and beautiful in form, and recalling many a bright memory of old faith and loyalty, is a very poor likeness of the lovely iris, or flagflower; so poor, indeed, that we could hardly guess it was intended for the same. The very name of fleur-de-lys is a mistake, as modern botanists have settled it, for it means lily-flower; and the iris in no respect resembles the lily, which we shall find in the sixth class instead of the third. Iris, the botanical name of the flag or fleur-de-lys, means the eye of heaven, and was given by the Greeks and Romans to the rainbow, which they thought the path |