444 Old Time Gardens 



trick of my memory. We recall our American 

 humorist's lament over the haunting lines from the 

 car-conductor's orders, which filled his brain and ears 

 from the moment he read them, wholly by chance, 

 and which he tried vainly to forget. A similar 

 obsession filled me when I read the spirited apos- 

 trophe to the Plantain or Waybred, in Cockayne's 

 translation of ^lfric's Lacunga, a book of leech- 

 craft of the eleventh century : — 



"And thou Waybroad, 

 Mother of worts, 

 Over thee carts creaked, 

 Over thee Queens rode, 

 Over thee brides bridalled, 

 Over thee bulls breathed, 

 All these thou withstoodst, 

 Venom and vile things, 

 And all the loathly things, 

 That through the land rove." 



I could not thrust them out of my mind ; worse 

 still, I kept manufacturing for the poem scores of 

 lines of similar metre. I never shall forget the 

 Plantain, it won't let me forget it. 



The Orpine was a flower linked with tradition 

 and mystery in England, there were scores of fanciful 

 notions connected with it. It has grown to be a 

 spreading weed in some parts of New England, but 

 it has lost both its mystery and its flowers. The 

 only bed of flowering Orpine I ever saw in America 

 was in the millyard of Miller Rose at Kettle Hole — 

 and a really lovely expanse of bloom it was, broken 

 only by old worn millstones which formed the door- 



