A Window in Arcady 
cherry, but yet they are as wild as the Indians.” Prob¬ 
ably this testy chronicler referred to the choke cherry, 
which is scarcely edible under the most favorable circum¬ 
stances. 
August 22. —How many northern folk that have read 
James Lane Allen’s romance of the Kentucky hemp fields 
know that the hemp plant is a not uncommon weed in the 
neighborhood of their cities ? It is coming into bloom now, 
and while its blossoms are rather lacking in beauty, the 
delicate fingered leaves are the very embodiment of aristo¬ 
cratic grace. The soul with a feeling of romance cannot 
but be touched at the sight of this historic plant, which 
from time immemorial has been associated with man in his 
economies, his vices, his superstitions. This is the plant 
whose fibres supplied cordage to the navies of Greece and 
Rome and Tyre and to the hangman time out of mind. 
Its resinous secretions form the basis of that drowsy syrup 
of the East, the insidious drug hashish, under whose influ¬ 
ence the mediaeval followers of the Old Man of the Moun¬ 
tain carried out the murderous will of that Oriental chief. 
Called hashishin—that is, the hashish eaters—they gave to 
our language one of its most terrible words—assassin. 
Among the simple-minded to dream of hemp has been 
firmly believed to portend evil, and the seed, besides pos¬ 
sessing its well-known prosaic value as food for canary 
birds, has played an important part in Old World divina¬ 
tion and as a love charm on St. Valentine’s day. 
August 27. —Along fence rows and country lanes at 
this the summer’s end, the elderberry bushes are hanging 
thick with their flat-topped clusters of ripe fruit. One 
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