Caraway calls up the cookies dear to childhood, and a spray of green Fennel brings back, as if by touch of the enchanter's wand—"Minister Garner" in the old meetin'-house under the big "sounding board" (relentless as fate) pursuing his theme to the bitter end, while seated, in the pen-like box pew, beside our devout grandmother, we tone ourselves down to the solemn occasion, with no higher aspiration than the wish to be butterflies sailing gayly in the outside sunshine. Virtue has, at last, its reward. At about the minister's soporific "fifthly" our grandmother catches herself nodding. Opening her roomy black silk workbag she gives herself a saving nibble of fennel and passes a delicious spray of this spicy herb to each of her three grandchildren.
Dear old grandma! a full half century ago her soul went home to God, yet still I recall my childish picture of her angel sweeping with wide wings the blue eternal spaces, with never-withering sprays of fennel in her hand.
One lingers lovingly over these pretty "Herbs O' Grace," of which the half has not here been told. But, already it is time to write finis at the end of this vagary—"My Garden in Spain."
CHAPTER XIV
The Cerebral Processes of Plants
I find it good to think of plants as mysterious fellow-existences, about which the half is not yet known—to speculate on their psychological properties—on what has been called "The cerebral processes of plants."
Darwin has thus expressed himself on this interesting question:
"It has," he says, "always pleased me to exalt plants in the scale of organized beings, and I therefore felt especial pleasure in showing how many and what admirably well-adapted movements the tip of a root possesses.... It was impossible in accordance with the principle of evolution," he goes on to say, "to account for climbing plants having been developed in so many widely different groups, unless all plants possess some slight power of movement of an analogous kind. This I proved to be the case."