STATE HOKTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 293 



of the pink moss roses to stock a graded school graduation; and 

 when his mother watches him crossing the lawn towards the city, 

 i5he knows those flowers are not going to the beer saloon or the 

 billiard hall, and she knows too that they will carry a silent mes- 

 sage to some other mother that says, we can trust our children 

 when they wear the badge or carry the tokens, or study together 

 the lessons of the flowers. 



How often a timely gift of flowers pays us for our labor in growing 

 them ! How delicately can we confer a favor or repay an obliga- 

 tion in this way, and how many fine lessons can be impressed by 

 flowers ! One day last summer I saw a railroad conductor, a young 

 man, new on the road, interfere to protect a passenger from the 

 insolence of a baggage-master. The next trip he made through 

 •our town, he found awaiting him at the station the best boquet 

 the place afforded, indorsed " with the compliments of Lake City 

 for politeness to passengers." When that boquet went home to 

 his mother, sister, wife or sweetheart — which of course it did — 

 while the givers reflected how it paid them to grow flowers, I dare 

 say the conductor was thinking and would never forget that it 

 paid to exercise common sense and politeness in the management 

 of a railroad train. ■' 



The flower garden pays in the aid it gives us in the regulation 

 of our lives. There are no creeds here to fetter the mind — no 

 •conventionalities to hinder our study into the laws of life. When 

 we study the organs and the growth of plants and flowers we are 

 led directly and irresistibly to apply the knowledge we gain by 

 analogy to ourselves as only higher forms of life; and seeiug one 

 great law of improvement or degradation governing all, we learn 

 to reverence the provisions that nature makes for man to work out 

 his own relief, and to understand that there is no escape from the 

 dreadful consequences of inattention to or violation of natural 

 law, either for ourselves or our posterity. 



We now understand as pomologists that the fundamental con- 

 dition of success is a knowledge of fruit blossoms. Let us note 

 and give due credit to the fact that all or nearly all our advance- 

 ment here, has had its beginning in the work of florists in the 

 study of the nature and uses of the organs of flowers; and here 

 we find that the flower garden has paid us as the greatest pro- 

 moter of our art. 



