General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1911 Original Publisher: The Macmillan Company Subjects: Fiction / Classics Fiction / Literary Fiction / Romance / General Fiction / Westerns History / General Literary Criticism / American / General Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER III MAGIC You took rose-leaves – fresh rose- leaves – and mixed them with brown sugar. Then you wrapped them in a leaf from a grape-vine, and buried the whole business in the ground. You let them stay for three days. At the end of that time you dug them up and ate them; ate them with rapture known only to those who have eaten this particular delicacy. For to the natural fragrance of the rose-leaves and the nourishing and delicious properties of brown sugar, that interval of three days in the warm earth had added a new quality. A mysterious alchemy had been at work and transformed the mixture into something exquisite – a dish to be envied by great kings and sultans. It had about it odors of the East; savors of Araby the blest. So said Ed Mason’s older brother, Billy. And he was nearly thirteen. He did not use all the words which I have used to describe the taste of the rose-leaf compound. He had merely said it was bully. That was enough for us – that, and the charm of the operation itself. He had tried it many times in the far-off days of his youth; and now we set out to make some for ourselves. The rose-leaves were easy to get. We had only to climb over the fence and we were in Auntie Merrill’s garden. Auntie Merrill was old, and she seldom came into the garden. She had no one with whom to share it; and the roses budded, bloomed, and dropped their petals unheeded to the path. From this p…