"And there's my roses! Just look at 'em! Every color a rose could be, and pretty near every kind there is. Wouldn't you think I'd be satisfied? But there's a rose I lost sixty years ago, and the ricollection o' that rose keeps me from bein' satisfied with all I've got. It grew in Old Lady Elrod's gyarden and nowhere else, and there ain't a rose here except grandmother's that I wouldn't give up forever if I could jest find that rose again. "I've tried many a time to tell folks about that rose, but I can't somehow get hold of the words. I reckon an old woman like me, with little or no learnin', couldn't be expected to tell how that rose looked, any more'n she could be expected to draw it and paint it. I can say it was yeller, but that word 'yeller' don't tell the color the rose was. I've got all the shades of yeller in my garden, but nothin' like the color o' that rose. It got deeper and deeper towards the middle, and lookin' at one of them roses half-opened was like lookin' down into a gold mine. The leaves crinkled and curled back towards the stem as fast as it opened, and the more it opened the prettier it was, like some women that grow better lookin' the older they grow,--Mary Andrews was one o'that kind,--and when it comes to tellin' you how it smelt, I'll jest have to stop. There never was anything like it for sweetness, and it was a different sweetness from any other rose God ever made. "I ricollect seein' Miss Penelope come in church one Sunday, dressed in white, with a black velvet gyirdle 'round her waist, and a bunch o' these roses, buds and half-blown ones and full-blown ones, fastened in the gyirdle, and that bunch o' yeller roses was song and sermon and prayer to me that day. I couldn't take my eyes off 'em; and I thought that if Christ had seen that rose growin' in the fields around Palestine, he wouldn't 'a' mentioned lilies when he said Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. "I always intended to ask for a slip of it, but I waited too long. It got lost one winter, and when I asked 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.