Reports of Local Societies. 335 



and beautiful, that children have grown up refined and lovely, and 

 that men and women everywhere have been lifted into a broader, 

 sweeter life? Flowers seem to know the eyes that love them, and 

 the hands that touch them caressingly, and they return this love 

 and pains a thousand fold in beauty and fragrance. 



But there, how I have digressed. I never could keep to the 

 practical out of the school-room. I sympathize with those erratic 

 souls who are continually flying off on tangents of philosophy, 

 poetry and the transmigration of souls. I commenced to make 

 some suggestions about the treatment of the Calla lily in order to 

 secure blossoms out of season, which the botany says is January or 

 February; but which, it seems to me, might be any other month, 

 provided the plant were kept dormant and only set growing in 

 time to secure maturity against the time predetermined for blos- 

 soming. 



I remember that once in the city I started out to purchase a 

 wedding present for a fair young bride about to be. " My pres- 

 ent," I said to myself, " shall possess three recpaisites; it must be 

 beautiful and appropriate and must cost" — I thought of my flat 

 purse and made a rapid estimate of the week's board and laundry 

 bills — "must cost only a dollar." You smile at the thought of a 

 wedding present that cost only a dollar; a wedding present too 

 that must take its rank among silver and gold and bridal jewels, 

 among rare books and pictures, delicate china and vases, and all 

 the costlv and fragile ornaments that a fashionable wedding in that 

 most proper of proper cities, Philadelphia, was wont to call forth 

 a few years ago, before a display of wedding presents fell into dis- 

 repute. As I turned a corner leading to S street, a humble 



green-house met my eye, before the door of which a hunch-back, 

 watering-pot in hand, was sprinkling some plants. My good angel 

 must have prevailed, for I turned aside to speak to the little 

 orist, who, with a politeness almost courtly, invited me in to see 

 his treasures. His conservatory was small and low, and the great 

 business blocks crowded and overshadowed him; but somehow the 

 blessed sunshine had found him out and wrought such miracles in 

 that narrow place as I have seldom seen in the conservatories of 

 the rich. The little man was a botanist, too, and his manner so 

 gentle and refined, his conversation so learned and interesting, 

 and withal he was so simple and unconscious, that I forgot his 

 22 — Hotjt. So. 



