Less than a year ago, when spring was well advanced, I placed a root in the mud, and left it to battle with the crowding native growths. Certainly the advantage was all upon one side, but it did not lose heart at being pitted against such heavy odds. Now it overshadows them all. For a time they are permitted to be co-occupants, but not for long. The lusty lotus is even now reaching out to a wide stretch of marshy meadow; and there too, I doubt not, it will flourish as at my neighbor’s. It is a rightful ambition to be able to sit down beneath one’s own vine and fig-tree. Let me add the lotus, for it has come to stay. For how long have water-lilies been on sale in our streets and at our railway stations, auguring well for the love of aquatic plants? And that strange and scarcely known lily, alas! of almost mephitic odor, the xerophyllum, is hawked about Philadelphia streets in early June, loved for its beauty despite the unfragrance; and so too this famous flower of other lands must soon appear, but not to sink to the level of a mere pretty blossom: it is too suggestive a plant to meet with such a fate. What Margaret Fuller once wrote to Thoreau well bears repeating: “Seek the lotus, and take a draught of rapture.” An Open Well. It is none of my business, but I feel a twinge of indignation when, as is frequently the case, I meet with a pump-maker. His long wagon, with its load of wooden tubes and other fixtures of the latest patterns of simple or compound pumps, is a positive eyesore; for, labor-saving as this may all be, it means, nevertheless, the obliteration of the open well, and for the old windlass, or still older sweep, a hideously painted post of wood or iron. He who has drunk, at midday in July, from an old oaken bucket, knows how great a loss one suffers by the change. Not even Hawthorne’s rills from the town pump can quite reconcile one. Perhaps it is a fool’s errand, but I have walked a mile out of my way, scores of times, for no other purpose than the pleasure of hearing the bucket splash in the waters of a deep well and to draw it up, by means of the well-poised sweep, “dripping with coolness.”