“Then there is the marigold. When I was of smallest dimensions, and wont to ride impacted between the knees of fond parental pair, we would sometimes cross the bridge to the next village-town and stop opposite a low, brown, ‘gambrel-roofed’ cottage. Out of it would come one Sally, sister of its swarthy tenant, swarthy herself, shady-lipped, sad-voiced, and, bending over her flower-bed, would gather a ‘posy,’ as she called it, for the little boy. Sally lies in the churchyard with a slab of blue slate at her head, lichen-crusted, and leaning a little with the last few years. Cottage, garden-beds, posies, grenadier-like rows of seedling onions,—stateliest of vegetables,— all are gone, but the breath of a marigold brings them all back to me.”
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1858
