However you do it, there is no more delicious experience in life than to put something beautiful where nothing was before, I mean in any suitable empty space. I have done it; I have had the consummation of this pleasure for a fortnight. There was no goldenrod in Simla till I went to America and got it. I make the lofty statement with confidence, but subject to correction. Some one may have thought of it long ago, and may be able to confront me with finer plumes than mine. If this should be so, I shall accept it with reluctance and mortification, and hereby promise to go and admire the other person’s, which is the most anybody can do; but my pride does not expect such a fall. It is the Queen’s goldenrod, not the President’s, though he has a great deal of it and makes, I think, rather more fuss about it. A field flower of generous mind, it ignores the political line, and I gathered the seed one splendid autumn afternoon in Canada; so here on the shelf it may claim its humble part in the Imperial idea. A friend of my youth lent herself to the project; she took me in her father’s buggy, and as we went along the country roads I saw again in the light of a long absence, the quiet of the fields and the broad pebbled stretches of the river, and the bronze and purple of the untrimmed woods that had always been for me the margin of the thought of home. The quiet of after-harvest held it all, nothing was about but a chipmunk that ran along the top of a fence; you could count the apples in the orchards among their scanty leaves; it was time to talk and to remember. And so, not by anything unusual that we did or said, but by the rare and beautiful correspondence that is sometimes to be felt between the sentiment of the hour and the hour itself, this afternoon took its place in the dateless calendar of the heart which is so much more valuable a reference than any other. What a delight it is when old forgotten things construct themselves again and the years gather into an afternoon! And is there any such curious instance of real usefulness for hidden treasure in the attic?