Our milkweed is tenacious of life; its roots lie deep, as if to get away from the plow, but it seldom infests cultivated crops. Then its stalk is so full of milk and its pod so full of silk that one cannot but ascribe good intentions to it, if it does sometimes overrun the meadow. "In dusty pods the milkweed Its hidden silk has spun," sings "H. H." in her "September". Of our ragweed not much can be set down that is complimentary, except that its name in the botany is _Ambrosia_, food of the gods. It must be the food of the gods if anything, for, so far as I have observed, nothing terrestrial eats it, not even billy-goats. (Yet a correspondent writes me that in Kentucky the cattle eat it when hard-pressed, and that a certain old farmer there, one season when the hay crop failed, cut and harvested tons of it for his stock in winter. It is said that the milk and butter made from such hay is not at all suggestive of the traditional Ambrosia!) It is the bane of asthmatic patients, but the gardener makes short work of it. It is about the only one of our weeds that follows the plow and the harrow, and, except that it is easily destroyed, I should suspect it to be an immigrant from the Old World. Our fleabane is a troublesome weed at times, but good husbandry has little to dread from it. [Illustration: A FLOWER IN A WOODLAND ROADWAY] But all the other outlaws of the farm and garden come to us from over seas; and what a long list it is:-- Common thistle, Gill, Canada thistle, Nightshade, Burdock, Buttercup, Yellow dock, Dandelion, Wild carrot, Wild mustard, Ox-eye daisy, Shepherd's purse, Chamomile, St. John's-wort, Mullein, Chickweed, Dead-nettle (_Lamium_), Purslane, Hemp-nettle (_Galeopsis_), Mallow, Elecampane, Darnel, Plantain, Poison hemlock, Motherwort, Hop-clover, Stramonium, Yarrow, Catnip, Wild radish, Blue-weed, Wild parsnip, Stick-seed, Chicory, Hound's-tongue, Live-forever, Henbane, Toad-flax, Pigweed, Sheep-sorrel, Quitch grass, Mayweed, and others less noxious. To offset this list we have given Europe the vilest of all weeds, a parasite that sucks up human blood, tobacco. Now if they catch the Colorado beetle of us, it will go far toward paying them off for the rats and the mice, and for other pests in our houses.