She was only ten years old the last time she saw those lilies: she was driving home the cows at night, in her pink calico dress and stout leather shoes, with her father’s old straw hat on the back of her head, “a picture of a happy, healthy, country lassie,” her father thought as he watched her standing by the clump of lilies while she waited for the cows to drink. She was thinking she would gather a big bunch of the lilies as soon as they were opened the next morning—but the pet calf came behind her and butted her down, and her father carried home in his arms a helpless little daughter. And there were tiger lilies in bloom; she could not see the place where they were growing, but it was only a quarter of a mile away in a fence corner, such a patch of them! Oh, how she longed to see those tiger lilies growing! The last time she saw the tiger lilies was the Sunday before she said good-bye to the blue lilies—she was walking home alone from Sunday-school in white dress and blue ribbons, and brown kid shoes, and when she came to the fence corner with the great clump of tiger lilies, she thought of picking a large bunch of them, but just then she heard a noise behind her, and turning, saw a neighbor’s three little black and white pigs; they had followed her all the way from the corner, and it was so funny to think how she had walked along unconsciously, with those pigs in single file behind her, that she just stood and laughed, and then she clapped her hands at them and chased them back, and forgot all about the tiger lilies. “Oh, blue lilies, oh, tiger lilies, I’ll _never_ see you growing any more,” she sighed. “Why, hello, daughter, you up there?” called the voice below her. Nettie did not answer; she felt too discouraged to speak, but she looked down and tried to smile at her father. Her father looked just as usual, only he had a scythe over his shoulder. “I came in a little earlier to cut down your weeds,” he called cheerily. Nettie watched him as he swung the scythe, and listened to the swish, swish, as the tall weeds fell; when the weeds around the well grew less she caught a glimpse of something blue, and then of something red; she pulled herself up to the window, and leaned out, and then she shrieked:— “Father, don’t cut down the _lilies_!” There they were, blue lilies and tiger lilies, growing together, close by the well! “How did they _get_ there, father?” she called. “They must have been in the sod that I put around the well last fall,” he replied; “I remember now that I got it from two different places. If I had cut down the weeds before the lilies bloomed, I shouldn’t have known they were there, and should have cut them all down together.” Nettie fell back in her chair with a sigh of delight, watching her father while with his hands he pulled all the weeds away from the lilies. “Mother,” she called, lifting herself forward, and resting her chin again on the window-sill.