restive eye of his great-grandfather, whom he never saw, looks at you from your two-year-old, and the spirit of that roving ancestor makes the boy also a fugitive and a vagabond on the earth!  No, no.  We may coax circumstances a little, and shove them about, and make the best of them, but there they are.  We may try to get out of their way; but they will trip us up, not once, but many times.  We may affect to tread them under foot in the daylight, but in the night-time they will turn again and rend us.  All we can do is first to accept them as facts, and then reason from them as premises.  We cannot control them, but we can control our own use of them.  We can make them a savor of life unto life, or of death unto death.

Application.—­If mind could have been supreme over matter, Halicarnassus should, in the first place, have taken the world at second-hand from me, and, in the second place, he should not have stood smiling on the front-door steps when the coach set me down there.  As it was, I made the best of the one case by following in his footsteps,—­not meekly, not acquiescently, but protesting, yet following,—­and of the other, by smiling responsive and asking pleasantly,—­

“Are the things planted yet?”

“No,” said Halicarnassus.

This was better than I had dared to hope.  When I saw him standing there so complacent and serene, I felt certain that a storm was brewing, or rather had brewed, and burst over my garden, and blighted its fair prospects.  I was confident that he had gone and planted every square inch of the soil with some hideous absurdity which would spring up a hundred-fold in perpetual reminders of the one misfortune to which I have alluded.

So his ready answer gave me relief, and yet I could not divest myself of a vague fear, a sense of coming thunder.  In spite of my endeavors, that calm, clear face would lift itself to my view as a mere “weather-breeder”; but I ate my supper, unpacked my trunks, took out my papers of precious seeds, and sitting in the flooding sunlight under the little western porch, I poured them into my lap, and bade Halicarnassus come to me.  He came, I am sorry to say, with a pipe in his mouth.

“Do you wish to see my jewels?” I asked, looking as much like Cornelia as a little woman, somewhat inclined to dumpiness, can.

Halicarnassus nodded assent.

“There,” said I, unrolling a paper, “that is Lychnidea acuminala.  Sometimes it flowers in white masses, pure as a baby’s soul.  Sometimes it glows in purple, pink, and crimson, intense, but unconsuming, like Horeb’s burning bush.  The old Greeks knew it well, and they baptized its prismatic loveliness with their sunny symbolism, and called it the Flame-Flower.  These very seeds may have sprung centuries ago from the hearts of heroes who sleep at Marathon; and when their tender petals quiver in the sunlight of my garden, I shall see the gleam of Attic armor and the flash of royal souls.  Like heroes, too, it is both beautiful and bold.  It does not demand careful cultivation,—­no hot-house, tenderness”—­