I have in my memory many other customs of childhood in the garden; some of them I have told in my book _Child Life in Colonial Days_, and there are scores more which I have not recounted, but most of them were peculiar to my own fanciful childhood, and I will not recount them here. One of the most exquisite of Mrs. Browning's poems is _The Lost Bower_; it is endeared to me because it expresses so fully a childish bereavement of my own, for I have a lost garden. Somewhere, in my childhood, I saw this beautiful garden, filled with radiant blossoms, rich with fruit and berries, set with beehives, rabbit hutches, and a dove cote, and enclosed about with hedges; and through it ran a purling brook--a thing I ever longed for in my home garden. All one happy summer afternoon I played in it, and gathered from its beds and borders at will--and I have never seen it since. When I was still a child I used to ask to return to it, but no one seemed to understand; and when I was grown I asked where it was, describing it in every detail, and the only answer was that it was a dream, I had never seen and played in such a garden. This lost garden has become to me an emblem, as was the lost bower to Mrs. Browning, of the losses of life; but I did not lose all; while memory lasts I shall ever possess the happiness of my childhood passed in our home garden. [Illustration: An Old Worcester Garden.] CHAPTER XVI MEETIN' SEED AND SABBATH DAY POSIES "I touched a thought, I know Has tantalized me many times. Help me to hold it! First it left The yellowing Fennel run to seed." --ROBERT BROWNING. My "thought" is the association of certain flowers with Sunday; the fact that special flowers and leaves and seeds, Fennel, Dill, and Southernwood, were held to be fitting and meet to carry to the Sunday service. "Help me to hold it"--to record those simple customs of the country-side ere they are forgotten. In the herb garden grew three free-growing plants, all three called indifferently in country tongue, "meetin' seed." They were Fennel, Dill, and Caraway, and similar in growth and seed. Caraway is shown on page 342. Their name was given because, in summer days of years gone by, nearly every woman and child carried to "meeting" on Sundays, bunches of the ripe seeds of one or all of these three plants, to nibble throughout the long prayers and sermon.