ed for and carefully ordered. It was all the work of an old woman
of Scotch-Irish descent, who had been busy with the cares of life, and
a very hard worker; yet I was told that to gratify her love for
flowers she would often go afoot many miles over those rough Virginia
roads, with a root or cutting from her own garden, to barter for a new
rose or a brighter blossom of some sort, with which she would return
in triumph. I fancied that sometimes she had to go by night on these
charming quests. I could see her business-like, small figure setting
forth down the steep path, when she had a good conscience toward her
housekeeping and the children were in order to be left. I am sure
that her friends thought of her when they were away from home and
could bring her an offering of something rare. Alas, she had grown too
old and feeble to care for her dear blossoms any longer, and had been
forced to go to live with a married son. I dare say that she was
thinking of her garden that very day, and wondering if this plant or
that were not in bloom, and perhaps had a heartache at the thought
that her tenants, the careless colored children, might tread the young
shoots of peony and rose, and make havoc in the herb-bed. It was an
uncommon collection, made by years of patient toil and self-sacrifice.

I thought of that deserted Southern garden as I followed my own New
England road. The flower-plots were in gay bloom all along the way;
almost every house had some flowers before it, sometimes carefully
fenced about by stakes and barrel staves from the miscreant hens and
chickens which lurked everywhere, and liked a good scratch and
fluffing in soft earth this year as well as any other. The world
seemed full of young life. There were calves tethered in pleasant
shady spots, and puppies and kittens adventuring from the doorways.
The trees were full of birds: bobolinks, and cat-birds, and
yellow-hammers, and golden robins, and sometimes a thrush, for the
afternoon was wearing late. We passed the spring which once marked the
boundary where three towns met,--Berwick, York, and Wells,--a famous
spot in the early settlement of the country, but many of its old
traditions are now forgotten. One of the omnipresent regicides of
Charles the First is believed to have hidden himself for a long time
under a great rock close by. The story runs that he made his miserable
home in this den for several years, but I believe that there is no
record that more than