s, even without apples
or cider--a most wise and humorous friend, whom I love much, who keeps
himself more secret than ever did Goffe or Whalley; and though he is
thought to be dead, none can show where he is buried. An elderly dame,
too, dwells in my neighborhood, invisible to most persons, in whose
odorous herb garden I love to stroll sometimes, gathering simples and
listening to her fables; for she has a genius of unequalled fertility,
and her memory runs back farther than mythology, and she can tell me the
original of every fable, and on what fact every one is founded, for the
incidents occurred when she was young. A ruddy and lusty old dame, who
delights in all weathers and seasons, and is likely to outlive all her
children yet.

The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature--of sun and wind
and rain, of summer and winter--such health, such cheer, they afford
forever! and such sympathy have they ever with our race, that all Nature
would be affected, and the sun's brightness fade, and the winds would
sigh humanely, and the clouds rain tears, and the woods shed their
leaves and put on mourning in midsummer, if any man should ever for a
just cause grieve. Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I
not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?

What is the pill which will keep us well, serene, contented? Not my or
thy great-grandfather's, but our great-grandmother Nature's universal,
vegetable, botanic medicines, by which she has kept herself young
always, outlived so many old Parrs in her day, and fed her health with
their decaying fatness. For my panacea, instead of one of those quack
vials of a mixture dipped from Acheron and the Dead Sea, which come out
of those long shallow black-schooner looking wagons which we sometimes
see made to carry bottles, let me have a draught of undiluted morning
air. Morning air! If men will not drink of this at the fountainhead
of the day, why, then, we must even bottle up some and sell it in the
shops, for the benefit of those who have lost their subscription ticket
to morning time in this world. But remember, it will not keep quite till
noonday even in the coolest cellar, but drive out the stopples long
ere that and follow westward the steps of Aurora. I am no worshipper of
Hygeia, who was the daughter of that old herb-doctor AEsculapius, and
who is represented on monuments holding a serpent in one hand, and in
the other a cup out of which the serpent sometimes drin