One July day I traveled from Quebec to Portland on the slowest of trains. The road ran for much of the way, first on one side, then on the other, of the Chaudière River, but never far out of sight of its clear brown waters. Fortunately for me, our locomotive used wood for fuel, and consequently every few hours we would stop at some great woodpile in a forest clearing while the trainmen threw a fresh supply of wood into the tender; and some of the passengers took advantage of the stop to make short explorations into the forest. About mid-day, as we were riding slowly along, I began to notice a pink-purple flower that was new to me, growing here and there in rather marshy places. Shortly after I had first seen the flower the added slowness of the train showed that we were coming to another woodpile. The instant the train stopped I was out of the cars, over the low rail fence, and picking my way carefully from grassy hummock to grassy hummock; and soon I had found a specimen. Upon analysis it proved to be calopogon, familiar to all New Englanders from childhood, but new to my Ohio eyes.
I have never made any formal herbarium, and the only botanical record I have ever kept consists of the date and place of my first seeing the flower written opposite its scientific name in the margin of the pages of my old school-girl's copy of Gray's Botany. But that is the only record one needs to whom all the flowers one knows are either old friends or new acquaintances--in either case distinct individuals. Often, as I have been turning the pages of the old botany in a bit of analyzing, I have stopped at the page on which is written, opposite the scientific name of the calopogon, 'Saint Henry's, Canada, July 11, 1884'; and across the more than twenty years that lie between, I smell once more the balsam of the Canadian forest, and see the amber-brown waters of the Chaudière River, and hear the shouts of the trainmen as they throw the great sticks of wood up to the tender; and giving color to all this mental picture is the pink-purple blossom of the calopogon.
But all trains do not have the accommodating habit of stopping for wood just after you have seen a strange flower; in that case, all that you can do is, take the best mental landmarks you can, and then at the first opportunity go back for your specimen. One summer I was going down on the express from Philadelphia to Cape May. As you near the coast the road runs through very level country, and between the railway and the pine wood lies a strip of marshy ground about forty feet wide. Each year, as I go back to the sea-coast, I watch eagerly for my first sight of the two characteristic flowers of the Jersey coast, the swamp mallow and the sabbatia. On this particular morning I had already seen many of the great mallows with their rose-pink flowers, so like those of the hollyhock that not even the most careless eye can fail to notice the family resemblance; and I had welcomed them as a sure sign of the fast-nearing seashore.