right, had it chosen to do so; and its
drooping seemed only an ugly habit, without grace. The cream-white
flowers grew in clusters, and the buds were really beautiful, but
color and form are only the body of the rose; the soul, the real self,
is the rose odor, and no rose-soul was incarnated in its petals. Again
and again, deceived by its beauty, I would hold it close to my face to
breathe its fragrance, and always its faint sickening-sweet odor
brought me only disappointment and disgust. It was a Lamia among
roses. Another peculiarity was that it had very few thorns, and those
few were small and weak. Yet the thorn is as much a part of the true
rose as its sweetness; and lacking the rose thorn and the rose
perfume, what claim had it to the rose name? I never saw this false
rose elsewhere than in the false garden, and because it grew there,
and because it dishonored its royal family, I would not willingly meet
it face to face again.

We children cultivated sweet-scented geraniums in pots, but a flower
in a pot was to me like a bird in a cage, and the fragrant geraniums
gave me no more pleasure than did the scentless many-hued
lady's-slippers that we planted in tiny borders, and the purple
flowering beans and white blossoms of the madeira vines that grew on
a tall trellis by the cistern's grassy mound. There was nothing here
to satisfy my longing, and I turned hungrily to other gardens whose
gates were open to me in those early days. In one of these was a vast
bed of purple heartsease, flower of the beautiful name. Year after
year they had blossomed and gone to seed till the harvest of flowers
in their season was past gathering, and any child in the neighborhood
was at liberty to pluck them by handfuls, while the wicked ones played
at "chicken fighting" and littered the ground with decapitated bodies.
There is no heartsease nowadays, only the magnificent pansy of which
it was the modest forerunner. But one little cluster of dark, spicy
blooms like those I used to gather in that old garden would be more to
me than the most splendid pansy created by the florist's art.

The lily of the valley calls to mind a garden, almost in the heart of
town, where this flower went forth to possess the land and spread
itself in so reckless a growth that at intervals it had to be uprooted
to protect the landed rights of the rest of the community. Never were
there such beds of lilies! And when they pierced the black loam with
their long s