x 74 
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 winter.” 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 
