“I should rather think not,” interrupted Halicarnassus.  “Pat Curran has his front-yard full of it.”

I collapsed at once, and asked humbly,—­

“Where did he get it?”

“Got it anywhere.  It grows wild almost.  It’s nothing but phlox.  My opinion is, that the old Greeks knew no more about it than that brindled cow.”

Nothing further occurring to me to be said on the subject, I waived it and took up another parcel, on which I spelled out, with some difficulty, “Delphinium exaltatum.  Its name indicates its nature.”

“It’s an exalted dolphin, then, I suppose,” said Halicarnassus.

“Yes!” I said, dexterously catching up an argumentum ad hominem, “It is an exalted dolphin,—­an apotheosized dolphin,—­a dolphin made glorious.  For, as the dolphin catches the sunbeams and sends them back with a thousand added splendors, so this flower opens its quivering bosom and gathers from the vast laboratory of the sky the purple of a monarch’s robe and the ocean’s deep, calm blue.  In its gracious cup you shall see”—­

“A fiddlestick!” jerked out Halicarnassus, profanely.  “What are you raving about such a precious bundle of weeds for?  There isn’t a shoemaker’s apprentice in the village that hasn’t his seven-by-nine garden overrun with them.  You might have done better than bring cartloads of phlox and larkspur a thousand miles.  Why didn’t you import a few hollyhocks, or a sunflower or two, and perhaps a dainty slip of cabbage?  A pumpkin-vine, now, would climb over the front-door deliciously, and a row of burdocks would make a highly entertaining border.”

The reader will bear me witness that I had met my first rebuff with humility.  It was probably this very humility that emboldened him to a second attack.  I determined to change my tactics and give battle.

“Halicarnassus,” said I, severely, “you are a hypocrite.  You set up for a Democrat”—­

“Not I,” interrupted he; “I voted for Harrison in ’40, and for Fremont in ’56, and”—­

“Nonsense!” interrupted I, in turn; “I mean a Democrat etymological, not a Democrat political.  You stand by the Declaration of Independence, and believe in liberty, equality, and fraternity, and that all men are of one blood; and here you are, ridiculing these innocent flowers, because their brilliant beauty is not shut up in a conservatory to exhale its fragrance on a fastidious few, but blooms on all alike, gladdening the home of exile and lightening the burden of labor.”

Halicarnassus saw that I had made a point against him, and preserved a discreet silence.