"Grandmother's rose, child, that's all the name it's got," she said, in answer to my question. "I reckon you think a fine-lookin' rose like that ought to have a fine-soundin' name. But I never saw anybody yet that knew enough about roses to tell what its right name is. Maybe when I'm dead and gone somebody'll tack a French name on to it, but as long as it grows in my gyarden it'll be jest grandmother's rose, and this is how it come by the name: "My grandfather and grandmother was amongst the first settlers of Kentucky. They come from the Old Dominion over the Wilderness Road way back yonder, goodness knows when. Did you ever think, child, how curious it was for them men to leave their homes and risk their own lives and the lives of their little children and their wives jest to git to a new country? It appears to me they must 'a' been led jest like Columbus was when he crossed the big ocean in his little ships. I reckon if the women and children had had their way about it, the bears and wildcats and Indians would be here yet. But a man goes where he pleases, and a woman's got to foller, and that's the way it was with grandfather and grandmother. I've heard mother say that grandmother cried for a week when she found she had to go, and every now and then she'd sob out, 'I wouldn't mind it so much if I could take my gyarden.' When they began packin' up their things, grandmother took up this rose and put it in an iron kittle and laid plenty of good rich earth around the roots. Grandfather said the load they had to carry was heavy enough without puttin' in any useless things. But grandmother says, says she: 'If you leave this rose behind, you can leave me, too.' So the kittle and the rose went. Four weeks they was on their way, and every time they come to a creek or a river or a spring, grandmother'd water her rose, and when they got to their journey's end, before they'd ever chopped a tree or laid a stone or broke ground, she cut the sod with an axe, and then she took grandfather's huntin' knife and dug a hole and planted her rose. Grandfather cut some limbs off a beech tree and drove 'em into the ground all around it to keep it from bein' tramped down, and when that was done, grandmother says: 'Now build the house so's this rose'll stand on the right-hand side o' the front walk. Maybe I won't die of homesickness if I can set on my front door-step and see one flower from my old Virginia gyarden.' "Well, grandmother didn't die of homesickness, nor the rose either. The transplantin' was good for both of 'em. She lived to be ninety years old, and when she died the house wouldn't hold the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren that come to the funeral. And here's her rose growin' and bloomin' yet, like there wasn't any such things in the world as old age and death. And every spring I gether a basketful o' these pink roses and lay 'em on her grave over yonder in the old buryin'-ground.