agreeable, though my old herbal calls its "a very naughty smell."

A favorite shrub in our garden, as in every country dooryard, was
southernwood, or lad's-love. A sprig of it was carried to meeting each
summer Sunday by many old ladies, and with its finely dissected,
bluish-green foliage, and clean pungent scent, it was pleasant to see in
the meeting-house, and pleasant to sniff at. The "virtues of flowers"
took a prominent place in the descriptions in old-time botanies. The
southernwood had strong medicinal qualities, and was used to cure
"vanityes of the head."

"Take a quantitye of Suthernwood and put it upon kindled coales to
burn and being made into powder mix it with the oyle of radishes
and anoynt a balde place and you shall see great experiences."

It was of power as a love charm. If you placed a sprig in each shoe and
wore it through the day when you were in love, you would then also in
some way "see great experiences."

In the tender glamour of happy association, all flowers in the old
garden seem to have been loved save the garish petunias, whose sickish
odor grew more offensive and more powerful at nightfall and made me long
to tear them away from their dainty garden-fellows, and the portulaca
with its fleshy, worm-like stems and leaves, and its aggressively
pushing habits, "never would be missed." Perhaps its close relation to
the "pusley," most hated of weeds, makes us eye it askance.

There was one attribute of the old-time garden, one part of nature's
economy, which added much to its charm--it was the crowding abundance,
the over-fulness of leaf, bud, and blossom. Nature there displayed no
bare expanses of naked soil, as in some too-carefully-kept modern
parterres; the dull earth was covered with a tangle of ready-growing,
self-sowing, lowly flowers, that filled every space left unoccupied by
statelier garden favorites, and crowded every corner with cheerful,
though unostentatious, bloom. And the close juxtaposition, and even
intermingling, of flowers with herbs, vegetables, and fruits gave a
sense of homely simplicity and usefulness, as well as of beauty. The
soft, purple eyes of the mourning-bride were no less lovely to us in
"our garden" because they opened under the shade of currant and
gooseberry bushes; and the sweet alyssum and candytuft were no less
honey-sweet. The delicate, pinky-purple hues of the sweet peas were not
dimmed by their vivid neighbors at the end of the row of