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It must be remembered that any permanent or indelible stain is a dye, and if boys and girls who live in the country were set to look for plants possessing the colour-quality, many new ones might be discovered. I am told by a Kentucky mountain woman, used to the production of reliable colour in her excellent weaving, that the ordinary roadside smartweed gives one of the best of yellows.
With their light splint hats on their heads, They ply their hoes on the ground, Clearing away the smartweed on the dry land and wet. The weeds being decayed, The millets grow luxuriantly. They fall rustling before the reapers. Those hundred houses being full, The wives and children have a feeling of repose.
This work had a scientific and professional look which infused a glimmer of light into the Cimmerian darkness. The bilious powders were made of the leaves of four plants familiarly known as spearmint, sunflower, smartweed, and yarrow.
From the profoundest deep of his teeming invention he succeeded in evolving only such utterly unsatisfying results as "rhinoceros," "polypus," and "sheeptick" in the animal kingdom, and "rhubarb," "snakeroot," and "smartweed" in the vegetable.
As the grass drew closer moisture it changed to the rank, sweet, swamp variety, then came bulrushes, cat-tails, water smartweed, docks, and in the water blue flag lifted folded buds; at its feet arose yellow lily leaves and farther out spread the white. As the light struck the surface the Harvester imagined he could see the little green buds several inches below.
To her, the level prairie, rank with goldenrod, pink-flowered smartweed, and purple aster, was a land of wondrous growth. For twenty years her home had been an arid mesa far to the south, where her father captained the caretakers of a spur railroad track.
Close along the side of the barn, as I sat there in the cool of the shade, I could see a tangled mat of smartweed and catnip, and the boards of the barn, brown and weather-beaten, and the gables above with mud swallows' nests, now deserted; and it struck me suddenly, as I observed these homely pleasant things: "All this is mine." I sprang up and drew a long breath. "Mine," I said.
Where the skin is poisoned, use a wash of smartweed steeped in water, or mix soot and cream, and apply it frequently; bruised Jamestown weed and cream is also good. If you have been exposed to poisonous plants, wash your face and hands immediately in salt and vinegar, or salt and water.
He gathers bitter-bark, tansy; ginseng, calamus, smartweed, and slippery elm, and from along old fences and barnyards, catnip and boneset, I suppose he lives somewhere, a hole in a log, or the limb of a tree, but no one knows where it is, or how he dries or cures his findings. No one knows his name: perhaps he has forgotten it himself. A name is no great matter anyway.
I used to love to drift along the pale-yellow cornfields, looking for the damp spots one sometimes found at their edges, where the smartweed soon turned a rich copper colour and the narrow brown leaves hung curled like cocoons about the swollen joints of the stem.
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