Flowers of Mystery 
443 
A great favorite in the old garden was the splen- 
did scarlet Lychnis, to which in New England is 
given the name of London Pride. There are two 
old varieties : one has four petals with squared ends, 
and is called, from the shape of the expanded flower, 
the Maltese Cross ; the other, called Scarlet Light- 
ning, is shown on a succeeding page; it has five 
deeply-nicked petals. It is a flower of midsummer 
eve and magic power, and I think it must have 
some connection with the Crusaders, being called by 
Gerarde Floure of Jerusalem, and Flower of Candy. 
The five-petailed form is rarely seen ; in one old 
family I know it is so cherished, and deemed so 
magic a home-maker, that every bride who has gone 
from that home for over a hundred years has borne 
away a plant of that London Pride; it has really 
become a Family Pride. 
Another plant of mysterious suggestion was the 
common Plantain. This was not an unaided instinct 
of my childhood, but came to me through an expla- 
nation of the lines in the chapter, cc The White 
Man’s Foot,” in Hiawatha : — 
(( Whereso’er they tread, beneath them 
Springs a flower unknown among us ; 
Springs the White Man’s Foot in blossom.” 
After my father showed me the Plantain as the 
“ White Man’s Foot,” I ever regarded it with a sense 
of its unusual power ; and I used often to wonder, 
when I found it growing in the grass, who had 
stepped there. I have permanently associated with 
the Plantain or Waybred a curious and distasteful 
