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24 ANNUAL REPORT. 
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dows, and balconies, and piazzas with flowers. Is one too poor to buy a 
rod of land? He can easily beg enough soil to fill a few pots, and with 
these lay out a garden in his kitchen, or dining-room, or parlor. Ar and 
water are cheap, and these are nearly all flowers need. s 
Cases must be very rare in which poverty is a reasonable excuse f for a 
flowerless home. Cultivating flowers, on the other hand, is one of the 
blessings of which the poor can be sure, and one of the ways in which 
they may successfully compete with the rich. They cannot buy diamonds 
and silks, and elegant furniture; let them decorate themselves and their é 
homes, then, with flowers. They cannot spend the winter in Florida ; let 
them invite the flowers of Florida, then, to come and spend the winter 
With them, 
Although we all love flowers, 
Our taste for them can be cultivated, 
making the pleasure they afford us immensely greater. They are scattered 
' everywhere so abundantly that their influence is diminished by familiarity. 
After all, how few of us appreciate them as we should, how few of us study 
them until we thoroughly understand their construction and realize their 
loveliness. ‘‘Behold,” said the Saviour, ‘the lilies of the field, how they 
grow.” Wow many heed this suggestion and stop to see ‘‘how they grow,” 
to treasure up the wonderful lesson they teach of nature and of Ged. And 
this leads me to say, finally, that 
‘“< Flowers are Moral Educators.” 
They serve as a perpetual stimulant to the moral sense; they exalt our 
feelings and tastes. Horace Smith exclaims, ‘‘ Your voiceless lips, O flow- 
ers, are living preachers—each cup a pulpit, and each leaf a book.” We 
naturally think of Napvleon as one whose stern and hardy nature was 
developed, at last, by rugged experience, into something like iron, and yet 
what tenderness and delicate sentiment was still left in him, when we read 
that he once made this remark: ‘*‘ Where flowers degenerate man cannot 
live.” He who stops to notice a flower, to pluck it, to admire it, be he 
ever so bad a man, gives at least one proof against his total depravity, 
one sign that his heart is yet in sympathy with the great world of beauty. 
The traveler in Europe and other Eastern lands, sees here and there, 
exhibitions of wretchedness and poverty, and uncleanliness, at which he 
stands appalled, but the picture has always this one redeeming character 
—the lowest of the people cultivate flowers. The love of flowers is the 
one uncorrupted and unfallen angel that flies with white wings among 
every class of people. Homes from which almost every nameable com- 
fort has been driven: where hunger, and nakedness, and want of all kinds, 
hold sway, can still afford a vine for the shattered window, and a lily, or 
pansy, or daisy for the ragged children to hold in their dirty hands. Peas- 
ant children often come running out of their homes with bouquets of 
flowers for sale, seeming confident, always, that they will find a way, 
through these, to the stranger’s heart and pocket, while the purchaser 
feels he has received something better than his money; that rays of beauty 
have been transferred to him from places where he would have seen no 
