120 Wisconsin State Horticultural Society. 



tions back, but the fault was there, incontrovertible. His father, 

 who considered this pre-natal stamp as a visitation upon him, tried 

 to reason it out of the boy, to whip it out of him — but all in vain. 

 Paint he must, and paint he did. In hurried hours stolen from 

 his meals and shop ; in lonelj garrets appropriated to the rats, and 

 cockroaches; sometimes far on into the midnight, in loneliness 

 and isolation, he wrought out the work the Master had given him 

 to do, until the talent within him could no longer be hidden 

 under a bushel, and to-day one or two of his pictures would buy 

 the old farm, out and out — cabbage p.itch, rutabaga lot and 

 all. Let us study our children. There are often stray waifs from 

 the land of the Genii dropped down at oar firesides, with flashes 

 from the Gods illumining their souls. We cannot make of them 

 common clay. We warp their inner being at our peril. Let us 

 fan the divine spark within them to the glory of the God of the 

 universe. Let us make them also home builders with us, archi- 

 tects of the nests we are fashioning for them. Teach their busy 

 fingers how to gather the twigs and threads, and moss, and how 

 to weave them well. Give full play to all their undeveloped talents 

 for construction and invention, which they bring with them from 

 the land across the mountains. Their fertile brains are the last 

 handiwork of the " hand which guides the stars ; " oftentimes 

 wondrous workshops of genius, and laboratories of thought, which 

 we, clogged as we are with the moil and toil of the years, are but 

 slow to see, still slower to appreciate. The venturesome little 

 hands, which, with a few attempts, might throw in their quaint 

 ideals of beauty to illuminate the highways and byways, we check 

 and curb. We have too little faith in their handicraft, and we do 

 not teach them to have faith in themselves, and then blame them if 

 they impede our labors with their "mischiefs," as we style them, not 

 remembering that they are but the overflow of suppressed energy, 

 and it may be that some invention the patient century is waiting 

 for is struggling in those very troublesome little brains. Would 

 the grand old peasant father of Carlyle have benefited the world, 

 any, if he had screwed down the strong intellect of his son with 

 the iron rivets of fate, placed a trowel in his hand and made a 

 good mason of him ? Or the father of Erickson, if he had made 



