THE LILIES 
which seemed to promise favorable results, 
until my collection was the most extensive in 
the world. These have been combined and 
selected, and recombined and reselected, until 
the most important results ever achieved 
among lilies are now an embodied fact. Of 
some of the older hybrids and seedlings I have 
as many as a thousand bulbs of each variety 
and have also half a million kinds yet to un- 
fold their petals for the first time, and am 
still planting from one to three pounds of 
hybridized lily seed every season. The best 
of the world’s lily experts who visited my 
grounds decided that there were at least two 
hundred and fifty thousand lilies which were 
distinct hybrids among the millions of lilies 
then blooming on my grounds. 
“Can my thoughts be imagined, after so 
many years of patient care and labor, as, walk- 
ing among them on a dewy morning, I look 
upon these new forms of beauty, on which 
other eyes have never gazed? Here a plant 
six feet high with bright yellow flowers, beside 
it one only six inches high with darkest red 
flowers, and, further on, one of pale straw, or 
snowy white, or with curious dots and shad- 
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