A Window in Arcady 
June io. —If any man goes dirty in these United States 
it is not Nature’s fault. She not only sets water freely 
by the dusty wayside, but soap also. The particular form 
in which this natural soap masquerades is the familiar 
flower known as bouncing bet, common on waste lots, in 
fields and along country roads. Everybody knows the 
comfortable-looking plant, with its stout, sleek leaves 
and abundant stars of white or pinkish bloom. The leaves 
and root are rich in the vegetable principle which chem¬ 
ists term saponin, and the foliage, if bruised and agitated 
in water, will produce a lather like that which is made 
by manufactured soaps and possessing similar cleansing 
properties. In spite of its abundance in this country, the 
plant is not native born, but is an importation from over 
the sea. It used to be a favorite in old-fashioned gardens, 
and it was to adorn these, doubtless, that its seeds were 
first brought to America. Taking kindly to our land, it 
eventually escaped from the respectable seclusion of gar¬ 
den life and is now a confirmed gypsy. 
A flower-bedecked meadow or roadside has been com¬ 
pared to a living palimpsest, where in the popular names 
of many plants we may read some dim record of our 
race’s history—its joys and sorrows, its superstitions and 
bygone practices. Thus our buxom bouncing bet in the 
Old World is sometimes called fuller’s herb, a name 
which perpetuates the memory of medieval monasteries, 
where the brothers used it for removing stains from cloth. 
The yellow flowered St. John’s wort, which grows in al¬ 
most every field, recalls to the lover of quaint and curious 
lore the time when yearly on midsummer eve (June 24) 
[58] 
