1900.] essays. 29 



occupations of this world, I hardly imagine that you would find 

 any body of men that have the habit of forethought developed 

 so much as the professional florists. I have been acquainted 

 with them for a good many years of my life and though they 

 have a good many weaknesses, — as all the rest of the world 

 have, — this virtue they possess in a large measure: they are 

 making ready almost always in their thoughts for the time that 

 is coming, and that is one of the best and noblest virtues that 

 human nature can cultivate ; not looking so much to the present 

 time with whatever it offers to us, but that the future may be 

 better; that the coming time may be grander and nobler than 

 any we possess or have ever known. 



You take, for instance, the ordinary amateur, and I suppose 

 I am addressing more amateurs than professional florists, and I 

 am glad of it, — just at the present time, there is very little that 

 we can do. Nearly all our work has been accomplished ; we 

 are only waiting. When you have taken your bulbs and hidden 

 them away in the earth and you know that when you have 

 placed them in the loom of Nature, with a woof of frost and a 

 warp of snow, she is weaving garments of scarlet and blue that 

 shall make the earth radiant with beauty when the spring days 

 shall come; and every time you look at the form of the beds 

 that are hidden away under coverlets of snow, you think of the 

 tulip and crocus and the joy-bells that will bye-and-bye ring 

 out in the gladdening peal the music of the spring. You have 

 made all these arrangements for a purpose. The work has been 

 done and you are living in anticipation of the reward that shall 

 come to you bye-and-bye. And so, as I say, the true flower- 

 lovers have that virtue, the virtue of forethought, developed 

 very largely. They simply cannot be avoided. 



You know there are certain inexorable conditions in nature. 

 We cannot escape from them, try as we may. One of them is 

 that delays are not simply dangerous, but delays arc fatal. No 

 proof of that can be given stronger than an experience that I 

 had a few days since. I went into a gieenhouse under the 

 management of one of the best gardeners 1 have ever known in 

 my life and I found him dropping tears, which continued nearly 



