There is no doubt that all the flowers of the old garden were far more suggestive, more full of meaning, than those given to us by modern florists. This does not come wholly from association, as many fancy, but from an inherent quality of the flower itself. I never saw Honeywort (Cerinthe) till five years ago, and then it was not in an old-fashioned garden; but the moment I beheld the graceful, drooping flowers in the flower bed, the yellow and purple-toothed corolla caught my eye, as it caught my fancy; it seemed to mean something. I was not surprised to learn that it was an ancient favorite of colonial days. The leaves of Honeywort are often lightly spotted, which may be one of its elements of mystery. Honeywort is seldom seen even in our oldest gardens; but it is a beautiful flower and a most hardy annual, and deserves to be reintroduced. [Illustration: Garden Walk at The Manse, Deerfield, Massachusetts.] A great favorite in the old garden was the splendid scarlet Lychnis, to which in New England is given the name of London Pride. There are two old varieties: one has four petals with squared ends, and is called, from the shape of the expanded flower, the Maltese Cross; the other, called Scarlet Lightning, is shown on a succeeding page; it has five deeply-nicked petals. It is a flower of midsummer eve and magic power, and I think it must have some connection with the Crusaders, being called by Gerarde Floure of Jerusalem, and Flower of Candy. The five-petalled form is rarely seen; in one old family I know it is so cherished, and deemed so magic a home-maker, that every bride who has gone from that home for over a hundred years has borne away a plant of that London Pride; it has really become a Family Pride. Another plant of mysterious suggestion was the common Plantain. This was not an unaided instinct of my childhood, but came to me through an explanation of the lines in the chapter, "The White Man's Foot," in _Hiawatha_:-- "Whereso'er they tread, beneath them Springs a flower unknown among us; Springs the White Man's Foot in blossom." After my father showed me the Plantain as the "White Man's Foot," I ever regarded it with a sense of its unusual power; and I used often to wonder, when I found it growing in the grass, who had stepped there. I have permanently associated with the Plantain or Waybred a curious and distasteful trick of my memory. We recall our American humorist's lament over the haunting lines from the car-conductor's orders, which filled his brain and ears from the moment he read them, wholly by chance, and which he tried vainly to forget. A similar obsession filled me when I read the spirited apostrophe to the Plantain or Waybred, in Cockayne's translation of AElfric's _Lacunga_, a book of leech-craft of the eleventh century:--