He was converted in the sanctuary, where one August Sabbath he beheld by the side of the pulpit, dignified by a large, beautiful vase, a great bouquet of this very tall, purple thoroughwort, meadow-rue, and wild-carrot of his abomination, and which had actually fallen before his scythe on the evening previous. "Well, there!" he exclaimed; "I didn't realize they _was_ so pretty!" The beauty of the commonplace often requires the aid of the artist as its interpreter, a fact which Browning realized when he expressed, through Fra Lippo Lippi: "We're made so that we love First when we see them painted, things which we have passed Perhaps a hundred times, nor cared to see." An illustration of the truth of this axiom was afforded in a recent incident in my experience. Sitting at the open window of my country studio one summer day, engaged in making a portrait of a common weed, a friendly farmer, chancing "across lots," seeing me at work, sauntered up to "pass the time o' day." As he leaned on the window-sill his eye fell upon the drawing before me. "My!" he exclaimed, "but ain't that pooty?" "What!" I retorted, "and will _you admit_ that this drawing of a _weed_ is pretty?" "Yes, your _draft_ thar is pooty, but you artist fellows alliz makes 'em look pootier 'n they _ought_ to." So much for the mere attributes of manifest outward beauty without regard to consideration of "botany" or the structural beauty of the flowers. The "botanist" finds beauty everywhere, even among the homeliest of Flora's hosts. But in the light of the "new botany," which recognizes the insect as the important affinity of the flower--the key to its various puzzling features of color, form, and fragrance--every commonest blossom which we thought we had "known" all our lives, and every homely weed scarce worth our knowing, now becomes a rebuke, and offers us a field of investigation as fresh and promising as is offered by the veriest rare exotic of the conservatory; more so, indeed, because these latter are strangers in a strange land, and divorced from their ordained insect affinities. The plebeian daisy now becomes a marvel of a flower indeed--five hundred wonderful little mechanisms packed together in a single golden disk. The red clover refuses to recognize us now unless properly introduced by that "burly bumblebee" with which its life is so strangely linked. The barn-yard weeds need no longer be considered uninteresting and commonplace, because their mysteries have not yet been discovered, and I can do no better in my present chapter than to select one of their number and redeem it from its hitherto lowly place among them--one of the homeliest of them all, and whose blossoms are scarce noticed by any one except a botanist.