Another custom of my youth was watching at dusk the opening of the twisted buds of the garden primrose into wan, yellow stars, "pallid flowers, by dew and moonlight fed," which filled the early evening with a faint, ineffable fragrance that drew a host of encircling night moths. Keats said they "leaped from buds into ripe flowers," a habit thus told by Margaret Deland:-- "Here, in warm darkness of a night in June, * * * * * children came To watch the primrose blow. Silent they stood, Hand clasped in hand, in breathless hush around, And saw her shyly doff her soft green hood And blossom--with a silken burst of sound!" In our home garden stood a clump of tall primroses, whose beautiful flowers, when opened, were four inches in diameter. When riding, one summer evening, along a seaside road on Cape Ann, we first saw one of these queens of the night in an humble dooryard. In the dark its seeds were gathered and given by an unknown hand and a flower-loving heart to my mother, to form under her "fair tendance" the luminous evening glory of her garden. And on summer nights this stately primrose still blooms in moonlight and starlight, though the gentle hand that planted it is no longer there:-- "Yon rising Moon that looks for us again How oft hereafter will she wax and wane How oft hereafter look for us Through this same Garden--and for _one_ in vain." To every garden-bred child the sudden blossoming and pale shining in the gloaming have ever given the evening primrose a special tender interest,--a faintly mystic charm through the chill of falling dew and the dim light, and through a half-sad atmosphere which has always encircled the flower, and has been felt by many of the poets, making them seldom sing the evening primrose as a flower of happiness. With the good night of children to the flowers, I close this record of old-time child life. Index _Ye labor and ye patience, ye judgment and ye penetration which are required to make a good index is only known to those who have gone through with this most necessary and painful but least praised part of a publication._ _--William Oldys, 1687._ Abcie. See Absey-book. Abiel, the name, 15. Abigail, the name, 16. Absey-book, 127, 229. _Accidence, Young Lady's_, 96, 135; _Cheever's_, 134. Acorn cups, playthings of, 386. Adams, Abigail, quoted, 93-94; patriotism of, 171. Adams, John Quincy, birth of, 40; letters of, 147, 169-170; patriotic education of, 170 _et seq._ Advertisements, of booksellers, 267 _et seq._ Æsop's _Fables_, 264. _Afflicted Parents_, 257. Agates, 375. Albany, N. Y., education of girls in, 94. Alleys, 375. "All the birds of the air," 348. Almanacs, notes in, 163. Almonds, 32. Alphabet-blocks, 182. _American Preceptor_, 144. Amphidromia, 18. Andover, Mass., school at, 83, 134.