in the leaves and root of some of them.  Carl’s father, though barely out of college, was a bright and gifted man.  One of his parishioners said once that they couldn’t afford a whole parson, and so they took a young one; but if that was the way of it, the men of Stenbrohult made a better bargain than they knew.  They sat about listening to his talk, but no one listened more closely than little Carl.  After that he had thought for nothing else.  In the corner of the garden he had a small plot of his own, and into it he planted all the wild flowers from the fields, and he asked many more questions about them than his father could answer.  One day he came back with one whose name he had forgotten.  The minister was busy with his sermon.

“If you don’t remember,” he said impatiently, “I will never tell you the name of another flower.”  The boy went away, his eyes wide with terror at the threat; but after that he did not forget a single name.

When he was big enough, they sent him to the Latin school at Wexioe, where the other boys nicknamed him “the little botanist.”  His thoughts were outdoors when they should have been in the dry books, and his teachers set him down as a dunce.  They did not know that his real study days were when, in vacation, he tramped the thirty miles to his home.  Every flower and every tree along the way was an old friend, and he was glad to see them again.  Once in a while he found a book that told of plants, and then he was anything but a dunce.  But when his father, after Carl had been eight years in the school, asked his teachers what they thought of him, they told him flatly that he might make a good tailor or shoemaker, but a minister—­never; he was too stupid.

That was a blow, for the parson of Stenbrohult and his wife had set their hearts on making a minister of Carl, and small wonder.  His mother was born in the parsonage, and her father and grandfather had been shepherds of the parish all their lives.  There were tears in the good minister’s eyes as he told Carl to pack up and get ready to go back home; he had an errand at Dr. Rothman’s, but would return presently.  The good doctor saw that his patient was heavy of heart and asked him what was wrong.  When he heard what Carl’s teachers had said, he flashed out: 

“What! he not amount to anything?  There is not one in the whole lot who will go as far as he.  A minister he won’t be, that I’ll allow, but I shall make a doctor of him such as none of them ever saw.  You leave him here with me.”  And the parson did, comforted in spite of himself.  But Carl’s mother could not get over it.  It was that garden, she declared, and when his younger brother as much as squinted that way, she flew at him with a “You dare to touch it!” and shook him.