INTRODUCTION TO A FERN PARADISE AT HOME. 155 
wliere they grow; and there would be that 
demand if the poor knew more about these ex¬ 
quisite plants. 
Ferns will grow where flowering plants would 
perish. They require moisture and shade—not 
stagnant, but percolating moisture. Place them 
where you will—on the floor, on the table of a 
dimly-lighted room, on the sunless window-sill, in 
a shady corner—anywhere, and they will grow 
and develope, unrolling their charming fronds, and 
exhibiting their sweet feathery forms with all 
their natural grace in the presence of squalor and 
misery. The poor seamstress painfully working 
in yon ill-lighted garret, where the glorious sun 
never comes, might perhaps have shed bitter tears 
over the withered flower that all her care had 
failed to rear! But a Fern would grow where 
her flower had died, would smile upon her with 
its mute, flowerless smile, would live in the dark 
light of her attic window, and, unfolding its 
fronds day by day, would assume its most graceful 
and most beautiful form even in the presence of a 
poor seamstress. 
But it is not only the poor who have to live in 
