I am surprised at this aspersion on the Marigold as to its smell, for all the traditions of this flower show it to have been a great favorite in kitchen gardens; and I have found that elderly folk are very apt to like its scent. My father loved the flower and the fragrance, and liked to have a bowl of Marigolds stand beside him on his library table. It was constantly carried to church as a "Sabbath-day posy," and its petals used as flavoring in soups and stews. Charles Lamb said it poisoned them. Canon Ellacombe writes that it has been banished in England to the gardens of cottages and old farm-houses; it had a waning popularity in America, but was never wholly despised. How Edward Fitzgerald loved the African Marigold! "Its grand color is so comfortable to us Spanish-like Paddies," he writes to Fanny Kemble in letters punctuated with little references to his garden flowers: letters so cheerful, too, with capitals; "I love the old way of Capitals for Names," he says--and so do I; letters bearing two surprises, namely, the infrequent references to Omar Khayyam; and the fact that Nasturtiums, not Roses, were his favorite flower. The question of the agreeableness of a flower scent is a matter of public opinion as well as personal choice. Environment and education influence us. In olden times every one liked certain scents deemed odious to-day. Parkinson's praise of Sweet Sultans was, "They are of so exceeding sweet a scent as it surpasses the best civet that is." Have you ever smelt civet? You will need no words to tell you that the civet is a little cousin of the skunk. Cowper could not talk with civet in the room; most of us could not even breathe. The old herbalists call Privet sweet-scented. I don't know that it is strange to find a generation who loved civet and musk thinking Privet pleasant-scented. Nearly all our modern botanists have copied the words of their predecessors; but I scarcely know what to say or to think when I find so exact an observer as John Burroughs calling Privet "faintly sweet-scented." I find it rankly ill-scented. The men of Elizabethan days were much more learned in perfumes and fonder of them than are most folk to-day. Authors and poets dwelt frankly upon them without seeming at all vulgar. Of course herbalists, from their choice of subject, were free to write of them at length, and they did so with evident delight. Nowadays the French realists are the only writers who boldly reckon with the sense of smell. It isn't deemed exactly respectable to dwell too much on smells, even pleasant ones; so this chapter certainly must be brief.