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scarlet beauty in the swales and along the 

 runnels! In good neighborhood you find 

 dittany, once sacred to Venus, and still ac- 

 counted a potent philter by some simple 

 folk who surely should know better. If 

 there is magic, it must lie in the smell. The 

 flower is minute, an ugly reddish-purple, and 

 the reddish stalks and yellow-green leaves 

 rarely grow higher than your hand. In the 

 moist places, too, you find clematis, trailing 

 drifts of green-white stars over whatever is 

 within reach. No wonder it climbs and 

 clings ! Each leaf stalk is a tendril ready 

 to lay hold of the smallest coign of vantage. 

 No wonder, either, that it so covers the face 

 of earth ! Its seed is legion. Even now the 

 first blossoming has changed to green feath- 

 ery sprays that at the touch of frost will 

 launch by tens of thousands their winged 

 argosies. 



Here be vagrants, stolen from prim gar- 

 den-beds, and laughing in light over their 

 freedom. All this fence corner is crowded 

 with tall pink rocket. The rosy panicles 

 nod saucily amid the tangle of wild grape 

 and brier. What scent they have, what col- 

 or, what robust richness of crowded bloom . 

 A little way farther you find poppies a rank 

 cluster, white, drooping, thick -fringed ex- 



