The yellow disk, or "button," of the ox-eye daisy, which was formed by stripping off the white rays, made a pretty pumpkin pie for the dolls' table. A very effective and bilious old lady, or "daisy grandmother," was made by clipping off the rays to shape the border or ruffle of a cap, leaving two long rays for strings, and marking in a grotesque old face with pen and ink. A dusky face, called with childish plainness of speech a "nigger head," could be made in like fashion from the "black-eyed Susan" or "yellow daisy," which now rivals the ox-eye daisy as a pest of New England fields. Though the spring violets were dearly loved, we slaughtered them ruthlessly by "fighting roosters" with them. The projecting spur under the curved stem at the base of the flower was a hook, and when the violets "clinched" we pulled till the stronger was conqueror, and the weaker head was off. What braided "cat-ladders," and quaint, antique-shaped boats with swelling lateen sail and pennant of striped grass could be made from the flat, sword-like leaves of the "flower-de-luce!" Filled with flowers, these leafy boats could be set gayly adrift down a tiny brook in the meadow, or, with equal sentiment, in that delight of children since Froissart's day, the purling gutter of a hillside street after a heavy midsummer shower. The flowers chosen to sail in these tiny crafts were those most human of all flowers, pansies, or their smaller garden sisters, the "ladies'-delights" that turned their laughing, happy faces to us from every nook and corner of our garden. The folk names of this flower, such as "three-faces-under-a-hood," "johnny-jump-up," "jump-up-and-kiss-me," "come-tickle-me," show the universal sense of its kinship to humanity. I knew a child who insisted for years that pansies spoke to her. Another child, who had stolen a rose, and hidden it under her apron, called out pettishly (throwing the rose in a pansy bed), "Here! take your old flower"--as the pansy faces blinked and nodded knowingly to her. The "dielytra" (bleeding-heart, or lady's-eardrops we called it) had long, gracefully drooping racemes of bright red-pink flowers, which when pulled apart and straightened out made fairy gondolas, or which might be twisted into a harp and bottle. How many scores have I carefully dissected, trying to preserve intact in skeleton shape the little heart-shaped "frame" of the delicate flower! The bleeding-heart is a flower of inexplicable charm to children; it has something of that mystery which in human nature we term fascination. Little children beg to pick it, and babies stretch out their tiny hands to it when showier blossoms are unheeded.