tulip stalks.

[A] F.H. Horsford of Charlotte, Vt., is very reliable in this matter.

XIV

FRAGRANT FLOWERS AND LEAVES

(Mary Penrose to Barbara Campbell)

_Woodridge, August 26._ The heliotrope is in the perfection of bloom and
seems to draw perfume from the intense heat of the August days only to
release it again as the sun sets, while as long as daylight lasts
butterflies of all sizes, shapes, and colours are fluttering about the
flowers until the bed is like the transformation scene of a veritable
dance of fairies!

Possibly you did not know that I have a heliotrope bed planted at the
very last moment. I had never before seen a great mass of heliotrope
growing all by itself until I visited your garden, and ever since I have
wondered why more people have not discovered it. I think that I wrote
you anent _hens_ that the ancient fowl-house of the place had been at
the point where there was a gap in the old wall below the knoll, and
that the wind swept up through it from the river, across the Opal Farm
meadows, and into the windows of the dining room? The most impossible
place for a fowl-house, but exactly the location, as _The Man from
Everywhere_ suggested, for a bed of sweet odours.

I expected to do nothing with it this season until one day Larry, the
departed, in a desire to use some of the domestic guano with which the
rough cellar of the old building was filled, carted away part of it, and
supplying its place with loam, dug over and straightened out the
irregular space, which is quite six feet wide by thirty long.

The same day, on going to a near-by florist's for celery plants, I found
that he had a quantity of little heliotropes in excess of his needs,
that had remained unpotted in the sand of the cutting house, where they
had spindled into sickly-looking weeds. In a moment of the horticultural
gambling that will seize one, I offered him a dollar for the lot, which
he accepted readily, for it was the last of June and the poor things
would probably have been thrown out in a day or two.

I took them home and spent a whole morning in separating and cutting off
the spindling tops to an even length of six inches. Literally there
seemed to be no end to the plants, and when I counted them I found that
I had nearly a hundred and fifty heliotropes, which, after rejecting
the absolutely hopeless, gave me six rows for the bed.

For several weeks my speculation in heliotropes was a subject of much
mir