andered helplessly over the ground, and amid a rank growth of weeds
sprang a host of yellow snapdragons. I remember the feeling of rapture
that was mine at the thought that I had found a garden where flowers
could be gathered without asking permission of any one. And as long as
I live, the sight of a yellow snapdragon on a sunny day will bring
back my father from his grave and make me a little child again
gathering flowers in that deserted garden, which is seemingly in
another world than this.

A later memory than this is of a place that was scarcely more than a
paved court lying between high brick walls. But because we children
wanted a garden so much, we called it by that name; and here and there
a little of Mother Earth's bosom, left uncovered, gave us some warrant
for the misnomer. Yet the spot was not without its beauties, and a
less exacting child might have found content within its boundaries.

Here was the Indian peach tree, whose pink blossoms told us that
spring had come. Its fruit in the late summer was like the pomegranate
in its rich color, "blood-tinctured with a veined humanity;" and its
friendly limbs held a swing in which we cleft the air like the birds.
Yet even now the sight of an Indian peach brings melancholy thoughts.
A yellow honeysuckle clambered over a wall. But this flower has no
perfume, and a honeysuckle without perfume is a base pretender, to be
cast out of the family of the real sweet-scented honeysuckle. There
were two roses of similar quality, one that detestable mockery known
as the burr-rose. I have for this flower the feeling of repulsion that
one has for certain disagreeable human beings,--people with cold,
clammy hands, for instance. I hated its feeble pink color, its rough
calyx, and its odor always made me think of vast fields of snow, and
icicles hanging from snow-covered roofs under leaden wintry skies.
Unhappy mistake to call such a thing a rose, and plant it in a child's
garden! The only place where it might fitly grow is by the side of the
road that led Childe Roland to the Dark Tower: between the bit of
"stubbed ground" and the marsh near to the "palsied oak," with its
roots set in the "bog, clay and rubble, sand and stark black dearth."

The other rose I recall with the same dislike, though it was pleasing
to the eye. The bush was tall, and had the nature of a climber; for it
drooped in a lackadaisical way, and had to be tied to a stout post. I
think it could have stood up