IIB Wisconsin State Hoeticultukal Society. 



mountains or seas shall wipe it out ; so that wherever they may 



roam ov^er the broad leagues of earth, that soft minor refrain may 



follow them : 



" One little home amid the rushes, 



One that I love, 



Still fondly to my memory gushes, 



Wherever I may rove." 



It does not require the wealth of a Stewart or a Vanderbilt to 

 scatter seeds of beauty along the way-sides of " this work-a-day 

 world." Beauty is as free as the air we breathe. It is only nig- 

 gard souls who starve themselves. The man who allows his home 

 and the home of his children to stand out stark and bare in the 

 clearing or the prairie, without a tree to guard it, or a flower to 

 mark it, is a heretic to one of the most ennobling influences of life. 

 Says William Howitt : " I avow it is one of the most fearless 

 articles of ray creed, that it is scarcely possible for a man in whom 

 the power of beauty is once fully established, to become utterly 

 debased in sentiment, or abandoned in principle. His soul may 

 be said to be brought into habitual union with the Author of 

 Nature, haunted forever by ths Eternal Mind." We have seen 

 in our travels a little log cabin made to look as regal as the 

 boudoir of a princess, with its shifting curtains of vines, and its 

 festoons of greenery, interspersed here and there with royal roses 

 and dainty clumps of mosses brought from the wild woods. 

 Teach the little ones that God's beauty is free to all; show them 

 His handiwork in a glowing cluster of autumn leaves and ferns ; 

 in the lillies of the valley, under the shade of the dark evergreen ; 

 in the climbing roses that cluster round your door, where the 

 humming bird flits through and through; and across the far-off 

 lanes of life, strange and crooked though they may be, they will 

 still look back to the days 



" When daisies and buttercups p;laddened their sight 

 Like treasures of silver and gold." 



A saddened wail cornea to us from many, too many, of our 

 gifted men and women, because the sunlight of their childhood 

 •was clouded by joyless and barren homes; because their earlier 

 memories carried with them the blight of a dungeon, instead of a 



