CROPS AND PROFITS 



it was the true daisy for all this, and I greeted 

 it with a welcoming franc of purchase money, 

 and carried it to my rooms, and established it 

 upon my balcony, where, while the flower 

 lasted, I made a new Picciola of it. And as 

 I watered it, and watched its green buttons of 

 buds unfolding the white leaflets, wide visions 

 of rough New England grass-lands came pour- 

 ing with the sunshine into the Paris window, 

 and with them, — the drowsy song of locusts, 

 — the gushing melody of Bob-o'-Lincolns, — 

 until the drum-beat at the opposite Caserne 

 drowned it, and broke the dream. 



These living and growing souvenirs of far- 

 away places, carry a wealth of interest and of 

 suggestion about them, which no merely inani- 

 mate object can do. I have flowers fairly 

 pressed, not having wholly lost their color, 

 which I plucked from the walls of Rome, and 

 others from a house-court of the buried Pom- 

 peii; but they are as dead as the guide-books 

 that describe the places. 



It is different wholly with a little potted Ivy 

 which a friend has sent from the walls of Ken- 

 ilworth. It clambers over a rustic frame within 

 the window — a tiny, but a real offshoot of 

 that great mass of vegetable life which is 

 flaunting over the British ruin; a little live 



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