zons, Psyche, etc." The precious roots were committed to the earth under the grandfather's eye, with a group of happy-hearted grandchildren gathered round about him. "How eagerly we watched the first appearance of the shoots above the ground. Each root was marked with its name on a bit of stick by its side; and what joy it was for us to discover the tender green breaking through the mould, and run to grandpapa to announce that we really believed that Marcus Aurelius was coming up, or that the Queen of the Amazons was above the ground." We can see the old pantalooned philosopher dropping his book or breaking away from his writing table, to join in the general jubilee attendant on the birth of another spring. "Then when the flowers were in bloom," she continues, "and we were in ecstasies over the rich purple and crimson, or pure white, or delicate lilac or pale yellow of the blossoms, how he would sympathize with our admirations. O, those were happy days!"
"There is a fulness of time when men should go, and not occupy too long the ground to which others have a right to advance," he had said, but the establishment of the University of Virginia saved his old age from the tragedy of unemployment, and kept him active to the last. His insistence that botany be made a part of the regular course constitutes perhaps his last step forward in scientific progress, and the situation there, the lawn, the gardens back of the professors' houses, and the serpentine wall, show the gardener in him at work to the end.
His last trail did not lead through paths of peace. Two years after his death The Richmond Enquirer carried the following advertisement:
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