a hung over her pot of
basil. I had never seen it before, and have never seen it since, but
by the witchery of perfume one of its yellow flowers, one of its soft
pale green leaves could place me again in that garden of the old inn,
a child walking among the ghosts and memories of a past century.

In all these flowery closes there are rich aftermaths; but when Memory
goes a-gleaning, she dwells longest on the evenings and mornings once
spent in Aunt Jane's garden.

"I don't reckon Solomon was thinkin' about flower gyardens when he
said there was a time for all things," Aunt Jane was wont to say, "but
anyhow it's so. You know the Bible says that the Lord God walked in
the gyarden of Eden in 'the cool of the day,' and that's the best time
for seein' flowers,--the cool of the mornin' and the cool of the
evenin'. There's jest as much difference between a flower with the dew
on it at sun-up and a flower in the middle o' the day as there is
between a woman when she's fresh from a good night's sleep and when
she's cookin' a twelve-o'clock dinner in a hot kitchen. You think them
poppies are mighty pretty with the sun shinin' on 'em, but the poppy
ain't a sun flower; it's a sunrise flower."

And so I found them when I saw them in the faint light of a summer
dawn, delicate and tremulous, like lovely apparitions of the night
that an hour of sun will dispel. With other flowers the miracle of
blossoming is performed so slowly that we have not time to watch its
every stage. There is no precise moment when the rose leaves become a
bud, or when the bud turns to a full-blown flower. But at dawn by a
bed of poppies you may watch the birth of a flower as it slips from
the calyx, casting it to the ground as a soul casts aside its outgrown
body, and smoothing the wrinkles from its silken petals, it faces the
day in serene beauty, though the night of death be but a few hours
away.

"And some evenin' when the moon's full and there's a dew fallin',"
continued Aunt Jane, "that's the time to see roses, and to smell
roses, too. And chrysanthemums, they're sundown flowers. You come into
my gyarden about the first o' next November, child, some evenin' when
the sun's goin' down, and you'll see the white ones lookin' like
stars, and the yeller ones shinin' like big gold lamps in the dusk;
and when the last light o' the sun strikes the red ones, they look
like cups o' wine, and some of 'em turn to colors that there ain't any
names for. Chrysanthem