The girls, however, thought that the vine was very pretty.
Every fall Theodora and Ellen, with Kate Edwards, and sometimes the Wilbur girls, went into the woods to gather lion's-paw and mitchella with which to decorate the old farmhouse at Thanksgiving and Christmas.
But it was one of their girl friends, named Lucia Scribner, or rather Lucia's mother, at Portland, who invented mitchella jars, and started a new industry in our neighborhood.
Lucia, who was attending the village Academy, often came up to the old farm on a Friday night to visit our girls over Saturday and Sunday.

On one visit they gathered a basketful of mitchella, and when Lucia went home to Portland for Thanksgiving, she carried a small boxful of the vines and berries to her mother.

Mrs.Scribner was an artist of some ability, and she made several little sketches of the vine on whitewood paper cutters as gifts to her friends.

In order to keep the vine moist and fresh while she was making the sketches, she put it in a little glass jar with a piece of glass over the top.
The vine was so pretty in the jar that Mrs.Scribner was loath to throw it away; and after a while she saw that the berries were increasing in size.

She had put nothing except a few spoonfuls of water into the jar with the vine; but the berries grew slowly all winter, until they were twice as big as in the fall.
Mrs.Scribner was delighted with the success of her chance experiment.
The jar with the vine in it made a very pretty ornament for her work table.