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 Aflfric’s Lacunga y 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- 
