Then one of the men stumbled upon a plant bearing clusters of tiny purple blossoms. The odor was very heavy around it, and he knew he had found the perfume giver.
“Ah!” he exclaimed in disappointment, “it is not half so stately as our fleur-de-lis.”
Jussieu came and examined it with great interest, and although it was a small, unpretentious flower, thought it a precious find. He noticed that the most perfect blossoms were on the sunny side of the plant, and that they seemed to reach the sun. He named it “heliotrope,” from Greek words meaning “to turn toward the sun,” and when he returned to France took with him some of the seeds, which were planted in the royal garden.
The princesses, who were always looking for something novel, became greatly excited about the purple blossoms from the Andes. They called it the flower of love, and no bouquet was deemed fit to offer a court lady that did not contain at least a sprig of it. Being greatly in demand, it was very costly. People speculated in it, and for a time fortunes were won and lost, as during the tulip craze in Holland.
Then, after a while, when all the florists grew quantities of heliotrope, it became so common that it went out of favor as the court flower. But it was just as popular as ever, because it had lost none of its grace and fragrance. It grew in the gardens of the people, and there was no peasant too poor to own a plant.
So the dainty heliotrope that is still the favorite of the gardens is a traveled and storied flower. It grew on the slope of the Andes. It crossed the broad seas and was planted in a royal garden. It gladdened the peasants and townsfolk of Lorraine and Brittany and Provence, and still it scatters its fragrance and reaches out its petals toward the sun.
THE FALL OF LONDON BRIDGE
(History)
Almost everybody, whether he be ten or seventy-five, has played the good old game of London Bridge, but not everybody knows that once upon a time the bridge really did fall down.