"And thou Waybroad, Mother of worts, Over thee carts creaked, Over thee Queens rode, Over thee brides bridalled, Over thee bulls breathed, All these thou withstoodst, Venom and vile things, And all the loathly things, That through the land rove." I could not thrust them out of my mind; worse still, I kept manufacturing for the poem scores of lines of similar metre. I never shall forget the Plantain, it won't let me forget it. [Illustration: London Pride.] The Orpine was a flower linked with tradition and mystery in England, there were scores of fanciful notions connected with it. It has grown to be a spreading weed in some parts of New England, but it has lost both its mystery and its flowers. The only bed of flowering Orpine I ever saw in America was in the millyard of Miller Rose at Kettle Hole--and a really lovely expanse of bloom it was, broken only by old worn millstones which formed the doorsteps. He told with pride that his grandmother planted it, and "it was the flowering variety that no one else had in Rhode Island, not even in greenhouses in Newport." Miller Rose ground corn meal and flour with ancient millstones, and infinitely better were his grindings than "store meal." He could tell you, with prolonged detail, of the new-fangled roller he bought and used one week, and not a decent Johnny-cake could be made from the meal, and it shamed him. So he threw away all the meal he hadn't sold; and then the new machinery was pulled out and the millstones replaced, "to await the Lord's coming," he added, being a Second Adventist--or by his own title a "Christadelphian and an Old Bachelor." He was a famous preacher, having a pulpit built of heavy stones, in the woods near his mill. A little trying it was to hear the outpourings of his long sermons on summer afternoons, while you waited for him to come down from his pulpit and his prophesyings to give you your bag of meal. A tithing of time he gave each day to the Lord, two hours and a half of preaching--and doubtless far more than a tithe of his income to the poor. In sentimental association with his name, he had a few straggling Roses around his millyard--all old-time varieties; and, with Orpine and Sweetbrier, he could gather a very pretty posy for all who came to Kettle Hole.