FRAGRANT FLOWERS AND LEAVES 291 



if I would take a lady and her nurse here to live with 

 me for the summer. They told me of her sickness 

 and how she was always talking of some cottage in 

 a garden of sweet-smelling flowers where she had lived 

 one happy summer with her husband and her boy, 

 and they placed the house as mine. 



"'Her folks said the doctors thought if she could 

 get back here for a time that it might help her. Then 

 I recollected that ten years before, when I went up to 

 Maine to visit my sister, I'd rented the place, just as 

 it stood, to folks of the name of Marchant, a fine couple 

 that didn't look beyond each other unless 'twas at 

 their son. In past times my grandmother had an old- 

 country knack of raising healing herbs and all sorts 

 of sweet-smelling things, along with farm truck, so 

 that folks came from all about to buy them and doctors 

 too, for such things weren't sold so much in shops in 

 those days as they are now, and so this place came to 

 be called the Herb Farm. After that it was sold off, 

 little by little, until the garden, wood lane, and orchard 

 is about all that's left. 



" 'I was lonesome and liked the idea of company, 

 and besides I was none too well fixed ; yet I dreaded a 

 mournful widow that wasn't all there anyway, accord- 

 ing to what they said, but I thought I'd try. Well, 



