I ate my supper, unpacked my trunks, took out my
papers of precious seeds, and sitting in the flooding sunlight under the
little western porch, I poured them into my lap, and bade Halicarnassus
come to me. He came, I am sorry to say, with a pipe in his mouth.

"Do you wish to see my jewels?" I asked, looking as much like Cornelia
as a little woman, somewhat inclined to dumpiness, can.

Halicarnassus nodded assent.

"There," said I, unrolling a paper, "that is _Lychnidea acuminala_.
Sometimes it flowers in white masses, pure as a baby's soul. Sometimes
it glows in purple, pink, and crimson, intense, but unconsuming, like
Horeb's burning bush. The old Greeks knew it well, and they baptized
its prismatic loveliness with their sunny symbolism, and called it the
Flame-Flower. These very seeds may have sprung centuries ago from the
hearts of heroes who sleep at Marathon; and when their tender petals
quiver in the sunlight of my garden, I shall see the gleam of Attic
armor and the flash of royal souls. Like heroes, too, it is both
beautiful and bold. It does not demand careful cultivation,--no
hot-house, tenderness"--

"I should rather think not," interrupted Halicarnassus. "Pat Curran has
his front-yard full of it."

I collapsed at once, and asked humbly,--

"Where did he get it?"

"Got it anywhere. It grows wild almost. It's nothing but phlox. My
opinion is, that the old Greeks knew no more about it than that brindled
cow."

Nothing further occurring to me to be said on the subject, I waived
it and took up another parcel, on which I spelled out, with some
difficulty, "_Delphinium exaltatum_. Its name indicates its nature."

"It's an exalted dolphin, then, I suppose," said Halicarnassus.

"Yes!" I said, dexterously catching up an _argumentum ad hominem_, "It
_is_ an exalted dolphin,--an apotheosized dolphin,--a dolphin made
glorious. For, as the dolphin catches the sunbeams and sends them back
with a thousand added splendors, so this flower opens its quivering
bosom and gathers from the vast laboratory of the sky the purple of a
monarch's robe and the ocean's deep, calm blue. In its gracious cup you
shall see"--

"A fiddlestick!" jerked out Halicarnassus, profanely. "What are you
raving about such a precious bundle of weeds for? There isn't a
shoemaker's apprentice in the village that hasn't his seven-by-nine
garden overrun with them. You might have done better than bring
cartloads of phlox and larkspur a thousa