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7 
22 F ANNUAL REPORT. 
in the church, in public halls, in shop windows, in portivos and on balcon- 
ies; they wind about columns, cover ‘old walls, light up front lawns, deco- 
rate schoolrooms: they are worn as ornaments for the person; they make — 
crowns for children and chaplets for heroes; and our nation could find no 
more delicate, genuine way of expressing its gratitude for the soldiers who 
perished in the late war than by covering the places where they sleep. with 
flowers. Here the odor of roses succeeds the smoke of battle; violets and 
lilies heal the wound of war, while they deck the brow of remembered pa- 
triotism. It is said that the cupid of the ancient Hindoos tipped his arrows 
with flowers. This young god of loye lives everywhere and always dwells 
amid flowers, lives on their breath, and reflects their colors from his eyes 
and lips. Says a certain writer: ‘‘ The instinctive and universal taste of 
mankind selects flowers for the expression of its finest sympathies, their 
beauty and their fleetingness serving to make them the most fitting sym- 
bols of those delicate sentiments for which language itself seems Viele 
too gross a medium.”’ 
Park Benjamin says: ‘‘ Flowers are love’s truest language.” He might 
have said they are a medium for all our thoughts and feelings. If language 
were abolished, these silent tongues of the field and garden might be used 
to reveal us to one another. 
Flowers seem to be equally 
““ Adapted to the young and to the old.” 
Emerson has written that ‘‘ Flowers belong so strictly to youth that we 
adult men soon come to feel that their beautiful generations concern us; 
we have had our way; now let the children have theirs.” As this New 
England sage is generally so clear in his judgment, Iam more astonished. 
at his willingness to givé up flowers to children, for what among earthly 
things does old age require or desire more. There are some things which 
we must grow up to before we can be interested in them; and there are 
also some things which, although they please us for awhile, we finally out- 
grow, but children, as soon as they love anything, love flowers; and old 
people, whose hairs Solomon compared to the white blossoms of the al- 
mond, love them equally well. The odor of the garden delights him who 
bowed with years, treads slowly the winding paths there, no less than the 
airy-footed boy who trips about with almost the ease and swiftness of the 
humming bird. 
Flowers are welcome and are 
Sought for at all Seasons. 
They brighten the morning and gladden the evening; their fragrance 
sweetens the noonday air and the darkness of night. There are many ob- 
jects which we love to have about us in summer we can readily spare in 
winter—which, indeed, seem out of place in winter. Food that is enjoy- 
able to the taste in warm weather we refuse in cold weather.’ Certain 
amusements cease to attract us beyond certain months; many of our 
feelings and moods come and go with the sun, with the spring and with 
the autumn, but our admiration for flowers seems not to be modified by 
either heat or cold, by south winds or north winds. If there be any dif- 
