272 TEANSACTIONS OP THE HOBTICULTUEAL 



ings of our local Society, and have learned to give my orchard the 

 most careful cultivation and attention. [ think I have one of the 

 best orchards in Illinois. 



President Burrill — We will now have the pleasure of hearing a 

 paper on 



HOME AND RURAL HOME ADORNMENT. 



BY MRS. R. H. MEAD, OF GALVA. 



Mr. Chairman, Officers and Members of the 



Central Illinois Horticultural Society. 



Ladies and Gentlemen: I cannot do myself justice without 

 first paying a tribute of praise to those who have so tastily decorated 

 this hall. Wreathed with evergreens and filled almost to faintness 

 with incense from a thousand flower chalices. This place looks like 

 a fairy bower; it is a painting, a poem, written by the hand of the 

 Infinite. 



The term Home and Rural Home Adornment, selected by you 

 as one of the topics for discussion during this meeting, is, to my 

 mind, one which should claim our best thoughts; one of deep inter- 

 est. The average theory of home life is, that the happiness of home 

 depends solely upon the wife. 



That woman's first and highest mission is her home. That there 

 are no clouds that ever overhang the home, that sunbeams bright 

 and joyous cannot penetrate; love and reason, hope and aspiration 

 blend in a gorgeous rainbow of promise, that arches the holy circle 

 of home. 



Home is a word we love to linger on; it brings around our hearts 

 a confiding trust and repose. It has been said that there is no 

 sweeter word in all the dialects of earth than the word home, unless 

 it be that of mother, and home always suggests her, and clusters 

 about it, more happy and hallowed associations than any other place. 

 Its impressions are the strongest, deepest and most ineffaceable. 

 Home means much in this nineteenth century. It means all that 

 makes life really worth the living; it is the object to which all un- 

 selfish endeavor is directed; it is the one solitary spot in the desert 

 of the world, when all those principles taught us in infancy preserve 

 their living green, and reaches out of the twilight of the past into 

 the sungold of the future; preserving unbrokenly for generations to 

 come the lessons of honor and virtue therein taught. 



It means life after death, the hereafter to all who are blessed 

 with offspring, in whom their own characteristics and energies are 

 perpetuated. It is the golden chrysalis where from the hope of the 

 future takes wings at last. 



