174 Old Time Gardens 



He lost his life through his poor simple notion. 

 In the village he was kindly treated by all, clothed, 

 fed, and warmed ; but one day there came skulking 

 along the edge of the village what were then rare 

 visitors, two tramps, who by ill-chance met poor 

 Elmer as he was gathering chestnuts. And as the 

 children lingered on their way home from school to 

 take toll of Elmer's store of nuts, they heard him 

 boasting gleefully of his wealth, " hundreds and 

 hundreds of dollars all safe for wintei. ' The chil- 

 dren knew what his dollars were, but the tramps 

 did not. Three days of heavy rain passed by, and 

 Elmer did not appear at the store or any house. 

 Then kindly neighbors went to his barn in the dis- 

 tant field, and found him cruelly beaten, with broken 

 ribs and in a high fever, while scattered around him 

 were hundreds of the seeds of his autumnal store of 

 the money plant; these were all the silver dollars 

 his assailants found. He was carried to the alms- 

 house and died in a few weeks, partly from the beat- 

 ing, partly from exposure, but chiefly, I ever believed, 

 from homesickness in his enforced home. His old 

 house has fallen down, but his well still is open, and 

 around it grows a vast expanse of Lunaria, which 

 has spread and grown from the seeds poor Elmer 

 saved, and every year shoots of the tender lilac 

 blooms mingle so charmingly with the white Daisies 

 that the sterile field is one of the show-places of the 

 village, and people drive from afar to see it. 



There grow in profusion in our home garden what 

 I always called the Mullein Pink, the Rose Campion 

 (Lychnis coronaria). I never heard any one speak 



