h exotic plants, unknown to her race; whether the insect would
show any hesitation in the presence of woolly plants offered for the
first time to the rakes of her mandibles. The common clary and the
Babylonian centaury, with which I have stocked the harmas, shall be the
harvest-fields; the reaper shall be the Diadem Anthidium, the inmate of
my reeds.

The common clary, or toute-bonne, forms part, I know, of our French
flora to-day; but it is an acclimatized foreigner. They say that a
gallant crusader, returning from Palestine with his share of glory and
bruises, brought back the toute-bonne from the Levant to help him cure
his rheumatism and dress his wounds. From the lordly manor, the plant
propagated itself in all directions, while remaining faithful to the
walls under whose shelter the noble dames of yore used to grow it for
their unguents. To this day, feudal ruins are its favourite resorts.
Crusaders and manors disappeared; the plant remained. In this case, the
origin of the clary, whether historical or legendary, is of secondary
importance. Even if it were of spontaneous growth in certain parts
of France, the toute-bonne is undoubtedly a stranger in the Vaucluse
district. Only once in the course of my long botanizing-expeditions
across the department have I come upon this plant. It was at Caromb, in
some ruins, nearly thirty years ago. I took a cutting of it; and since
then the crusaders' sage has accompanied me on all my peregrinations.
My present hermitage possesses several tufts of it: but, outside the
enclosure, except at the foot of the walls, it would be impossible to
find one. We have, therefore, a plant that is new to the country for
many miles around, a cotton-field which the Serignan Cotton-bees had
never utilized before I came and sowed it.

Nor had they ever made use of the Babylonian centaury, which I was the
first to introduce in order to cover my ungrateful stony soil with
some little vegetation. They had never seen anything like the colossal
centaury imported from the region of the Euphrates. Nothing in the local
flora, not even the cotton-thistle, had prepared them for this stalk
as thick as a child's wrist, crowned at a height of nine feet with a
multitude of yellow balls, nor for those great leaves spreading over the
ground in an enormous rosette. What will they do in the presence of such
a find? They will take possession of it with no more hesitation than if
it were the humble St. Barnaby's th