A great favorite in the old garden was the splendid scarlet Lychnis, to which in New England is given the name of London Pride. There are two old varieties: one has four petals with squared ends, and is called, from the shape of the expanded flower, the Maltese Cross; the other, called Scarlet Lightning, is shown on a [succeeding page]; it has five deeply-nicked petals. It is a flower of midsummer eve and magic power, and I think it must have some connection with the Crusaders, being called by Gerarde Floure of Jerusalem, and Flower of Candy. The five-petalled form is rarely seen; in one old family I know it is so cherished, and deemed so magic a home-maker, that every bride who has gone from that home for over a hundred years has borne away a plant of that London Pride; it has really become a Family Pride.
Another plant of mysterious suggestion was the common Plantain. This was not an unaided instinct of my childhood, but came to me through an explanation of the lines in the chapter, "The White Man's Foot," in Hiawatha:—
"Whereso'er they tread, beneath them
Springs a flower unknown among us;
Springs the White Man's Foot in blossom."
After my father showed me the Plantain as the "White Man's Foot," I ever regarded it with a sense of its unusual power; and I used often to wonder, when I found it growing in the grass, who had stepped there. I have permanently associated with the Plantain or Waybred a curious and distasteful trick of my memory. We recall our American humorist's lament over the haunting lines from the car-conductor's orders, which filled his brain and ears from the moment he read them, wholly by chance, and which he tried vainly to forget. A similar obsession filled me when I read the spirited apostrophe to the Plantain or Waybred, in Cockayne's translation of Ælfric's Lacunga, a book of leech-craft of the eleventh century:—
"And thou Waybroad,
Mother of worts,
Over thee carts creaked,
Over thee Queens rode,
Over thee brides bridalled,
Over thee bulls breathed,
All these thou withstoodst,
Venom and vile things,
And all the loathly things,
That through the land rove."
I could not thrust them out of my mind; worse still, I kept manufacturing for the poem scores of lines of similar metre. I never shall forget the Plantain, it won't let me forget it.
London Pride.