, I think Aunt Judy says, being a
precisely scientific little aunt. But I can't keep it out of my own less
scientific head that 'vegetable' means only something going to be boiled. I
like 'plant' better for general sense, besides that it's shorter.

Whatever we call them, Aunt Judy is perfectly right about them as far as
she has gone; but, as happens often even to the best of evangelical
instructresses, she has stopped just short of the gist of the whole matter.
It is entirely true that a weed is a plant that has got into a wrong place;
but it never seems to have occurred to Aunt Judy that some plants never
_do_!

Who ever saw a wood anemone or a heath blossom in the wrong place? Who ever
saw nettle or hemlock in a right one? And yet, the difference between
flower and weed, (I use, for convenience sake, these words in their {108}
familiar opposition,) certainly does not consist merely in the flowers
being innocent, and the weed stinging and venomous. We do not call the
nightshade a weed in our hedges, nor the scarlet agaric in our woods. But
we do the corncockle in our fields.

4. Had the thoughtful little tutoress gone but one thought farther, and
instead of "a vegetable in a wrong place," (which it may happen to the
innocentest vegetable sometimes to be, without turning into a weed,
therefore,) said, "A vegetable which has an innate disposition to _get_
into the wrong place," she would have greatly furthered the matter for us;
but then she perhaps would have felt herself to be uncharitably dividing
with vegetables her own little evangelical property of original sin.

5. This, you will find, nevertheless, to be the very essence of weed
character--in plants, as in men. If you glance through your botanical
books, you will see often added certain names--'a troublesome weed.' It is
not its being venomous, or ugly, but its being impertinent--thrusting
itself where it has no business, and hinders other people's business--that
makes a weed of it. The most accursed of all vegetables, the one that has
destroyed for the present even the possibility of European civilization, is
only called a weed in the slang of its votaries;[32] but in the finest and
truest English we call so the plant which {109} has come to us by chance
from the same country, the type of mere senseless prolific activity, the
American water-plant, choking our streams till the very fish that leap out
of them cannot fall back, but die on the clogged surface; an