Word: orchid
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...father of the first Wellington, had tastes which were singular indeed in the begetter of an Iron Duke. It is known to relatively few Americans, save such insatiable antiquaries as myself, that the Earl of Mornington was addicted to playing violin sonatas while seated in an armchair upholstered with orchid-colored velvet, composed numerous four-voiced glees, two of which were named respectively "Gently Hear Me, Charming Maiden" and "Come, Fairest Nymph...
...news about themselves. It was lordly Charles Alexander who, many years ago. prompted a secretary to announce: "The gentleman from the Transcript, and four reporters." Last winter Mr. Alexander yielded his duties to his assistant. Anne L. Lawless, known to her colleagues as "Orchid Annie." Manhattan's social writing dean is an elderly gentleman with a walrus mustache-Frank Leslie Baker of the Times. His department is supposed to admit to print all creeds providing they can claim an ancestor who lived in the U. S. before the Civil War. More colorful than their dean are Maury Henry Riddle...
John Lager found the world's rarest orchid in 1908. Of a batch of Cattleya Gigas he had shipped from South America, one astonishingly bloomed Albino. He sold it, the only one ever found, to Baron Firmen Lambeau of Belgium for $10,000. Lambeau managed to propagate it but it is still the world's rarest known orchid...
Rarer still but now unknown was a red Masdevallia orchid powdered with gold. Lager once found a single specimen of it growing high in a South American tree. He searched in vain for more nearby, later found some 500 mi. away. He shipped a lot to the coast where they somehow got sidetracked. In a seaport warehouse they lay until they were dead. No one has yet found any more gold-powdered red orchids like that...
...Orchid Man Lager usually hunted alone with native bearers, sending his finds back to his Partner Henry Hurrell, now 78, by muleback, canoe and raft. Once a hostile Indian tribe led him into virgin orchid territory after he had cured a sick child with a dose of patent cough medicine. Another time, looking closely into a new orchid, he met the stare of a deadly little red coral snake. Once he camped on a little island in the great Orinoco River, his orchids all boxed on their rafts for the trip home. Flood, freshets boomed down the river, lifted Lager...