I thought to myself: “She herself was John Kenton’s chief rose.” I thought: “He had her in mind when he set these ameliorating bushes through the wild.” Possibly the girl could not read or write. Yet she was royal. Democracy has the ways of a jackdaw. Democracy hides jewels in the ash-heap. Democracy is infinitely whimsical. Every once in a while a changeling appears, not like any of the people around, a changeling whose real ancestors are aristocratic souls forgotten for centuries. As the girl’s eyes narrowed, she became Queen Thi, the masterful and beautiful potentate of immemorial Egypt whose face I have seen in a museum, carved on a Canopic jar. She was Queen Thi only an instant, then she became a Tennessee girl again, with the eyes of a weary doe. She said: “Them roses give me comfort. That’s all the church I get.” I asked: “Why are there so many roses between here and Greenville and none near Flagpond?” It was her turn not to speak. The old woman as though to save her pain, answered: “The flowers of these parts were all brought in by John Kenton. He lived in Flagpond, but could not sell them there.” And the mother of the little boy, the man-woman, whose husband had killed Kenton, broke her long silence: “The only flowers we have to-day are these he brought. I think we would die without them.... How do we get through the winter?” Lady Iron-Heels and her sister-in-law took a swig of whisky from the jug under the table, and lifted up their hoes from the floor. The boy whimpered for a drink. They said: “Wait till you are a man.” All three climbed the hill. Lady Iron-Heels was the last to go over the ridge. She saw me gather buds from both those bushes by the spring. She made a gesture of salute with her hoe. I never travelled that way again. I passed by quickly; therefore I had a glimpse of what she was intended to be. “He that loseth his life shall find it.” I see her many a time when I am looking on scattered rose-leaves. She was a woman, God’s chief rose for man. She was scorned and downtrodden, but radiant still. I am only saying that she wore the face of Beauty when Beauty rises above circumstance. The buds that I had gathered did not fall to pieces till I had passed by Daniel Boone’s old trail on through Cumberland Gap, on over big hill Kentucky into the Blue Grass. On the way I wrote this, their poor memorial, the Canticle of the Rose:-- It is an article of my creed that the petals of this flower of which we speak are a medicine, that they can almost heal a mortal wound. The rose is so young of face and line, she appears so casually and humbly, we forget she is an ancient physician. Yet so much tradition is wrapped around her stalk, it is strange she is not a mummy. Her ashes can be found in the tombs of the Pharaohs, in everlasting companionship with the ashes of the lotus and the papyrus plant. Her dust travels on every desert wind. No love-song can do without her.