THE AMERICAN BOTANIST. 31 
for their hearthstone, they watch and tend the fire beneath 
the coal-oil can, which contains their heterogeneous fare. 
About twenty miles west of our old home in Northern 
Kansas was a portion of that long line of low mounds in 
which the Dakota sandstone ' stretches nearly across the 
state. One day my brother brought back from these mounds 
some mullein stocks, the first I had ever seen. With boyish 
interest I wished to see what the living plants were like, 
and scattered the seed about the barnyard and pasture. 
I soon forgot all about the mullein seed and never sus- 
pected the nature of the few large woolly leaved plants 
which made their appearance the following year. But the 
year after they soon made themselves known by sending 
up their long spikes of yellow flowers. They seemed to 
thrive for a while and increased in numbers, but after a 
tim.e their numbers grew less and in a few years they were 
gone. The old barnyard and a certain rocky portion of the 
pasture where they grew would seem to have been an ideal 
place for them. It would almost seem as though they, like 
their human kindred, had lived so long on the *'seamy 
side," had w^andered so far and wide, that they could no 
longer settle down in any place, however favorable, but 
must needs yield to the instinct to rove and be off again. 
I have seldom been in a locality where a few plants 
of the mullein could not be found. I have frequently noted 
it throughout Kansas, Missouri, Iowa and Illinois, as far 
as the shores of the Great Lakes. On the Pacific Coast 
it seems to be fairly abundant throughout the Sacramento 
Valley, the Rogue River Valley and the Willamette Valley, 
and about the Puget Sound countn.^ Here in Northern 
Idaho I have found it at high elevations, far back in the 
wilderness. To what extent it is to be found in the great 
arid tracts of the West I am unable to say, but I found it 
quite plentiful far out upon the plains in the countn- about 
