A still more pleasant afternoon I spent in visiting the haunts of the far-famed Nymph of the Caspian. Neither rock nor whirlpool besets the approach of this coy beauty, but as the siren can be seen only in her bath, from the luxurious heat of which she draws not a few of her charms, one might well be led to prefer both Scylla and Charybdis to the peril of the brink to which this fascinator lures unsuspecting travellers at Chyulpan. Yet the danger is much more apparent than real. The Nympha Caspica has broken up no households and precipitated no fratricidal wars; the worst that can be said against her is that she has planted a deep and never-to-be-satisfied longing in the heart of botanical Europe. Men of science, tender in their admiration of her beauty, and wishing to see it flourish elsewhere, have carried her virtues to foreign parts in vain. This tall, lily-like flower, with its over flowing bulb of tender pink, bearing its seeds in a puncture gourd, and bathed far up its slender stem by a continual flow of well-nigh boiling water, mysteriously renewed - this queen of desert, unpopulous Chyulpan, scattering her perfume over land and sea, is the unique product of unique conditions, and can no more be transplanted than the Caspian itself".

The above is from a paper in the Atlantic Monthly, by Edmund Noble, and we give it as a companion piece to a selection from Bret Harte recently. It is amazing that the editors of respectable magazines can pass such stuff. Few readers probably know that the plant referred to is but the Nelumbium speciosum. The form growing in the Caspian has rather blunter petals than the other. Even as a variety the Caspian Lily has often been under culture.