Page:Letters of Life.djvu/19

Rh and varied robes, the protean sweet-william, the aspiring larkspur, the proud crown imperial, the snowdrop, the narcissus, and the hyacinth, so prompt to waken at Spring's first call, side by side with the cheerful marigold, braving the frost-kiss; pinks in profusion, and a host of personified flowers, peeped out of their tufted homes, like nested birds; the beauty by night, the ragged lady, the mourning widow, and the mottled guinea hen. The dahlias had not then appeared with their countless varieties, but the asters instituted a secondary order of nobility; coxcombs and soldiers in green rejoiced in their gay uniform; the borders were enriched with shrubbery, tastefully disposed, at whose feet ran the happy blue-bell and the bright-eyed hearts-ease, intent with a few other lowly friends on turning every crevice to account, and making the waste places beautiful.

A portion of ground was allotted to such herbs as were supposed to possess the latent power of repelling disease. There grew the tansy, and the peppermint, and the spearmint; the wormwood and the rue, a spoonful of whose expressed juice, given either as tonic or vermifuge, was never forgotten by the mouth that received it; the spikenard, and the lovage, and the elecampane, the pungent pennyroyal, the bitter boneset, famed for subduing colds; the aromatic thyme that fought fevers, and the sapient sage, which seemed complacently satisfied with its own excellences, or bearing