"With these upper-class plants were blended, in republican fellowship, the useful vegetables of the working sort;--beets, handsome with dark-red leaves; carrots, with their elegant filigree foliage, parsnips that cling to the earth like mandrakes; radishes, illustrations of total depravity, a prey to every evil underground emissary of the powers of darkness; onions, never easy until they are out of bed, so to speak, a communicative and companionable vegetable, with a real genius for soups; squash vines with their generous fruits, the winter ones that will hang up 'ag'in the chimbly' by and by--the summer ones, vase like, as Hawthorne described them, with skins so white and delicate, when they are yet new-born, that one thinks of little sucking pigs turned vegetables, like Daphne into a laurel, and then of tender human infancy, which Charles Lamb's favorite so calls to mind;--these, with melons, promising as 'first scholars,' but apt to put off ripening until the frost came and blasted their vines and leaves, as if it had been a shower of boiling water, were among the customary growths of the Garden." Then follows, in these charming reminiscences, an account of the reconstruction of the dear old Garden. "Consuls Madisonius and Monrovious left the seat of office, and Consuls Johannes Quincius, and Andreas, and Martinus, and the rest, followed in their turn, until the good Abraham sat in the curule chair. In the meantime changes had been going on under our old gambrel roof, and the Garden had been suffered to relapse slowly into a state of wild nature. The haughty flower-de-luces, the curled hyacinths, the perfumed roses, had yielded their place to suckers from locust-trees, to milkweed, burdock, plantain, sorrel, purslane; the gravel walks, which were to nature as rents in her green garment, had been gradually darned over with the million threaded needles of her grasses until nothing was left to show that a garden had been there. "But the Garden still existed in my memory; the walks were all mapped out there, and the place of every herb and flower was laid down as if on a chart. "By that pattern I reconstructed the Garden, lost for a whole generation as much as Pompeii was lost, and in the consulate of our good Abraham it was once more as it had been in the days of my childhood. It was not much to look upon for a stranger; but when the flowers came up in their old places, the effect on me was something like what the widow of Nain may have felt when her dead son rose on his bier and smiled upon her.