A lady who has lately been making a visit in the West was telling the other day about the forlorn aspect of the country out that way to her. "Even the Golden-rod," she said; "you can't imagine how scraggly and poor it looks, compared with our magnificent flowers along the road here. I wonder what makes the Western Golden-rod so inferior." The very next day there arrived at her house a relative whom she had been visiting when she was in the West. He sat on the veranda, and looked indulgently—even admiringly—at the landscape, and praised its elements of beauty. But as his eye ran along the roadside near by, he said: "But there is one thing that we are ahead of you in—you have no such splendid Golden-rod here as we have out West! The Golden-rod growing along that road, now, is tame and poor compared with ours." What a blessed thing it is that the gold of our own waysides is richer than the gold of all other waysides!