sked Old Lady Elrod about it she
said, 'Mistress Parrish, I cannot tell you whence it came nor whither
it went.' The old lady always used mighty pretty language.

"Well, honey, them two lost flowers jest haunt me. They're like dead
children. You know a house may be full o' livin' children, but if
there's one dead, a mother'll see its face and hear its voice above
all the others, and that's the way with my lost flowers. No matter how
many roses and chrysanthemums I have, I keep seein' Old Lady Elrod's
yeller roses danglin' from Miss Penelope's gyirdle, and that bed o'
pink chrysanthemums under Dr. Pendleton's dinin'-room windows."

"Each mortal has his Carcassonne!" Here was Aunt Jane's, but it was no
matter for a tear or even a sigh. And I thought how the sting of life
would lose its venom, if for every soul the unattainable were embodied
in nothing more embittering than two exquisite lost flowers.

One afternoon in early June I stood with Aunt Jane in her garden. It
was the time of roses; and in the midst of their opulent bloom stood
the tall white lilies, handmaidens to the queen. Here and there over
the warm earth old-fashioned pinks spread their prayer-rugs, on which
a worshiper might kneel and offer thanks for life and spring; and
towering over all, rows of many-colored hollyhocks flamed and glowed
in the light of the setting sun like the stained glass windows of
some old cathedral.

Across the flowery expanse Aunt Jane looked wistfully toward the
evening skies, beyond whose stars and clouds we place that other world
called heaven.

"I'm like my grandmother, child," she said presently. "I know I've got
to leave this country some day soon, and journey to another one, and
the only thing I mind about it is givin' up my gyarden. When John
looked into heaven he saw gold streets and gates of pearl, but he
don't say anything about gyardens. I like what he says about no
sorrer, nor cryin', nor pain, and God wipin' away all tears from their
eyes. That's pure comfort. But if I could jest have Abram and the
children again, and my old home and my old gyarden, I'd be willin' to
give up the gold streets and glass sea and pearl gates."

The loves of earth and the homes of earth! No apocalyptic vision can
come between these and the earth-born human heart.

Life is said to have begun in a garden; and if here was our lost
paradise, may not the paradise we hope to gain through death be, to
the lover of nature, another garden