BANQUET TO GARDENERS. 55 
and would sit down and talk with her, and at last she says 
to him: ‘* There is a bad fellow around here in the neigh- 
borhood and I wish you would scare him away.’’. Well, 
he took it rather seriously, and meeting the young man as 
he came out of the cow pasture, or, perhaps coming up 
through the lane, one evening, he commenced to ** make 
faces ’’ at him and finally squared off at him and then sailed 
into him in the true ethical style as followed in Boston by 
John L. Sullivan, and he whaled the fellow all to pieces in 
a little while. The consequence was that the customers of 
this young man rather took it to heart and, as the legend 
says he was the man who fixed up the flowers for the poets 
and literary men of the day, they thought that they ought 
to do something to avenge his death. So they consulted 
with Apollo to know what to do about it. Now Apollo, as 
far as we can learn, was a pretty shrewd kind of an old fel- 
low who didn’t like to go to work and do any thing very 
atrocious to this young woman. He had some of the gal- 
lantry that people have nowadays and he studied it over 
and concocted the plan and said, ‘* Now, I will turn this 
fellow who has lost his life in an honorable, industrious oc- 
cupation, into a flower, and I will make this young lady use 
this very flower if she continues in the business.’” And so, 
from the blood that was spilled, there sprang up beautiful 
carnations or, perhaps, sunflowers or golden-rod; it does 
not say exactly what kind of a flower it was. But the young 
lady was compelled to use these very flowers in her work 
and to sell them to her customers, and at last she got to 
love them, — to really love the fellow himself through the 
flowers he manifested himself in. 
Now there is a lesson right here in this story for the 
commercial florists. It teaches us to have regard for each 
other, to have something in common with each other. 
There is too much of that friction and jealousy. There is too 
much of that wanting to do every thing ourselves: wanting 
to do it independently of every body else, unlike any one 
else. My few years’ experience has taught me that the | 
