THE PIvANT WORLD 125 



quite a little annual income, and the same may be said of the Sabbatia, 

 so familiar to the Plj^mouth tourist, the cardinal flower, the fringed gen- 

 tian, the columbine, the white pond lily, the sand violets iViola pedata) , 

 and some of our more showy native orchids that have a gregarious ten- 

 dency, such as the pogonia, calopogon, arethusa, and the lady's slippers. 

 From one spot in a peat-bog in Michigan, last June, eighteen hundred of 

 the showy lady's slippers {.Cypripedium reginae) were gathered at one fell 

 swoop. The writer herself was guilty a few summers since of turning a 

 dozen children loose in an acre of pogonias near Bayville on the Maine 

 coast. The little vandals fell upon them and slew them by thousands, 

 and yet seemed to make no impression on the prevailing pink-purple 

 tone of the meadow. 



Such places might be made to yield a perpetual income. Transplant- 

 ing and fostering young plants, distributing the seeds, and discretion in 

 harvesting, in a word, aiding instead of thwarting Nature, could not fail 

 in valuable and financial results. Just as large tracts of once worthless 

 land on the Maine coast now yield something like fifteen dollars per acre 

 from the yearly cutting of young fir-trees for the Christmas season, and 

 as many acres of undrained swamp in Michigan are being utilized for the 

 growth and production of peppermint, so might the sand-barren and the 

 peat-bog and even the stagnant pool be made to yield a wealth of flowers 

 with an economic, an educational, and an esthetic value. 



The college girl who would gladly return to her country home if only 

 there were some way by which she might make her own spending money 

 for books and magazines and the new wants that are one of the results 

 of college education, might profitably and joyously enter upon this work. 

 It would be difficult to find a more truly educational and benevolent field 

 of usefulness. To send into the heart of a great city real bits of the real 

 country ! While it is true that ultimately a great majority of the flowers 

 find their way into the homes of the rich, still the florist's window, like 

 the month of June, "may be had by the poorest comer "; and the crowd 

 pauses and lingers longest about the window where the first spring wild 

 flowers are displayed. 



Also childhood is alike the world over, and while we can not but de- 

 plore a condition where among sixty children in a certain grade of a 

 school in one of the poorest and most crowded districts of New York City, 

 no one child knew all of the four common flowers, the violet, clover, 

 buttercup, and daisy, still it is equally true that the children of the rich 

 know but little of the charms of the country. 



In addition to the market of the florist, there is growing up in our 

 high-schools a demand for material that is in itself a problem. Some of 

 our larger high-schools receive this material literally by the barrel. Un- 

 less there be some rational way of supplying this demand, the study of 



