WINTER MEETING. 431 



upon it. Horticulture will do this, therefore it is a blessing. IIow often one 

 thrifty garden or carefully kept lawn will cause the owner of every home in 

 the neigliborhood to make his surroundings more beautiful. In the keeping 

 of a garden one may have bad luck, and like Dudley Warner, lose all the 

 financial gains and grow weary in body by fighting "pussly," that "type of 

 original sin;" and yet be riclily paid for all his time and pains, as he was, in 

 the healthful meditations to which it gives i4se. 



Uow like a garden is the human heart. Uow as in heart culture, do we 

 have to constantly strive to eradicate the evil. But, conquered at last, what a 

 rich fruitage it bears. IIow like the century plant are some lives that live on 

 for years, gathering the power and elaborating the material that finally blos- 

 8oms forth in blessings on the world. How some lives, like the oak, buffet 

 the storms and grow strong by the very resistance they are compelled to bat- 

 tle. Row other lives, like the climbing vine, can only reach the pure sun- 

 shine and light of Heaven as they cling to some stronger life. How still 

 others too, too beautiful for earth, like the morning glory, last but for a day 

 — smile once and die. I pity the one who cannot gather moral, mental and 

 physical strength from the teeming plant life about him. I was crossing the 

 college campus a few days since passing under a large oak tree, found to my 

 surprise that hundreds of acorns lay beneath it and that nearly every one of 

 them had, last fall, sent down a vigorous root into the earth and each was 

 only waiting the blessing of warmth and sunlight to build a tree. Each had 

 done its part and was prepared to accept what the God of Nature had in store 

 for it. Ah, thought I, how well it were if men would get ready with equal 

 faithfulness for the success God vouchsafes to such promptness to duty. 

 Again I thought how much this acorn resembles a proper course of study in 

 college or elsewhere. It should be simply the well rooted acorn from which 

 shall spring the giant oak of a wise, grand and helpful manhood. 



I would encourage the cultivation of flowers especially by all, as a means 

 of moral culture and of blessing to others. The earliest recollections of my 

 precious mother are associated with them and they are intertwined with a 

 thousand blessed memories of her noble, self-sacrificing life. She was never 

 too busy to neglect the care of them about our humble log home when I was 

 a child and, even now, in her old age, she still cares for them both in and 

 around the old homestead. She early taught me to love them as one of 

 God's greatest blessings, and both home and mother were made dearer and 

 life had less of temptation because of their presence. They still form one 

 of the brightest spots in my memory of the dear old home and its inmates. 



It has been said that music is the only art of earth that will be able to pass 

 the sentinel angel at the gates of Paradise. I have often thought that Heaven 

 would be incomplete and that my mother would be lonely there without flow- 

 ers. We plait them in the hair of the fair young bride ; they bless the sick- 

 room by their presence ; we place them on the casket of the silent sleeper; 

 we plant them on the graves of our loved ones; we scatter them above the 

 forms of our heroic soldier-dead. 



Flowers, emblems of the soul, 



Looking with beautiful eyes. 

 Turn the thoughts of the erring man 



To his home beyond the skies. 



