ORNAMENTATION ABOUT THE HOME. 21 
. desires make a bad combination. Some of the soul-destroying moil of 
money-making must be eliminated. There may be gold untold buried deep 
in the frozen heart of Alaska, but the life spent in finding and unearthing it 
must be a joyless and comparatively useless one. So the man who owns a 
little piece of mother earth, but is spending all his time endeavoring to lay 
- -—s« up wealth against a time of need, lets pass the real “time of need” without 
2 an effort to meet its demands. Where one fails to secure bread enough to 
keep soul and body together, a hundred are so morally starved that a divorce 
of soul and body could hardly be deemed a misfortune, either to the man 
himself or to the community which he did nothing to benefit. Better set 
' apart a portion of that land for improvement during his leisure hours, while 
he is at the same time improving and developing his own higher nature. 
The owner of a home may make that home a thing of beauty and a 
source of joy to himself and others by ornamenting it with well-chosen 
shrubbery, tastefully arranged, and giving it proper care. It is fortunate 
that in this favored land every young man of sound health and intellectual 
vigor may confidently look forward to the possession of such a home and 
all the happiness the name suggests. The greatest pleasure comes from 
giving pleasure to others, and these inexpensive adornments, which delight 
the eye of the passer-by, are silent but efficient teachers of the practical value 
of esthetics and the benign influence of beauty upon life and character. 
Moreover, the occupants of such a home will soon begin to take an inter- 
est in living in harmony with their environments, and if we can conceive of 
their being low and brutish by instinct can we imagine them so stupid as not 
to perceive the difference between the discord within and the harmony with- 
out? They will, perhaps unconsciously and with little will power at first, 
endeavor to make the different portions of their abiding place more nearly 
correspond to one another. They will see the present condition is as outre 
as a patch of royal satin purple on a jacket of linsey-woolsey. It would be 
like using Neptune’s trident for a pike pole or the spear of Ithuriel for a 
dung-fork. 
Carpets and costly furniture are constantly growing worse with even the 
most careful usage. With similar care the shrubs and vines ate, year by 
year, growing into beauty, and the little patch of ground around the home 
becomes more: and more attractive. People, going by, admiring, say, 
“What a pleasant place to live!” Touched by the appreciation of what has 
: already been done, the family are inspired to do something more towards 
making home brighter, and when neighbors, quickened by their example, 
begin to think of utilizing the waste, weedy spots about their homes and 
come, as they surely will, to those who have had successful experience for 
advice, and, now and then, ask for a slip or a root of something that has 
particularly struck their fancy, the groveling souls that started this good 
work become more conscious of its merit°and are lifted up a step higher. 
In the short space of five minutes, one can but glance at a few of the 
advantages that spring from the cultivation of flowering shrubs and climb- 
ing vines about our doors, but that one glance should be enough to con- 
vince the thoughtful that nothing is more practically useful than to increase 
one’s appreciation of the beautiful. 
Mr. I. M. Smith, (Wis.): The paper that interested me most 
was the president’s paper in the way he put forth the idea of the 
