was always
talking of some cottage in a garden of sweet-smelling flowers where she
had lived one happy summer with her husband and her boy, and they placed
the house as mine.

"'Her folks said the doctors thought if she could get back here for a
time that it might help her. Then I recollected that ten years before,
when I went up to Maine to visit my sister, I'd rented the place, just
as it stood, to folks of the name of Marchant, a fine couple that didn't
look beyond each other unless 'twas at their son. In past times my
grandmother had an old-country knack of raising healing herbs and all
sorts of sweet-smelling things, along with farm truck, so that folks
came from all about to buy them and doctors too, for such things weren't
sold so much in shops in those days as they are now, and so this place
came to be called the Herb Farm. After that it was sold off, little by
little, until the garden, wood lane, and orchard is about all that's
left.

"'I was lonesome and liked the idea of company, and besides I was none
too well fixed; yet I dreaded a mournful widow that wasn't all there
anyway, according to what they said, but I thought I'd try. Well, sir,
she come, and that first week I thought I'd never stand it, she talked
and wrung her hands so continual. But one day what do you think
happened? I chanced to pick a nosegay, not so much fine flowers perhaps
as good-smelling leaves and twigs, and put it in a little pitcher in her
room.

"'It was like witchcraft the way it worked; the smell of those things
seemed to creep over her like some drugs might and she changed. She
stopped moaning and went out into the garden and touched all the posies
with her fingers, as if she was shaking hands, and all of a sudden it
seemed, by her talk, as if her dead were back with her again; and on
every other point she's been as clear and ladylike as possible ever
since, and from that day she cast off her black clothes as if wearing
'em was all through a mistake.

"'The doctors say it's something to do with the 'sociation of smells,
for that season they spent in my cottage was the only vacation Dr.
Marchant had taken in years, and they say it was the happiest time in
her life, fussing about among my old-fashioned posies with him; and
somehow in her mind he's got fixed there among those posies, and every
year she plants more and more of them, and what friends of hers she
ever speaks of she remembers by some flowers they wore or liked.