LIZZIE DANE’S STRAW FLOWERS. 
The door to the spare chamber was ajar; Lizzie Dane 
could see that from the foot of the front entry stairs, 
where she stood. She had just come in from school, 
and not finding her Mother in the kitchen or pantry, 
where she was nearly always busily at work, Lizzie 
flung her school books on to the lounge, and started on a 
tour through the house in search of her. 
She popped her head in at the parlor door, a darkened, 
stifling room, smelling of green paper curtains and pea¬ 
cock feathers, that all day long had been blistering and 
oozing behind the closed windows in the intense heat of 
a July day. 
Mother not there. 
She closed the door softly, so softly, the prim bouquets 
of brittle, dry grasses on either end of the mantle 
scarcely stirred with the little puff of fresh air the clos¬ 
ing door set in motion. Glancing up the narrow stair¬ 
way, she saw the spare chamber door was unlatched. 
" What in the world is Mother up there for at this 
time of day ? It's five o'clock this minute; the men are 
coming in from the hay field, and no fire kindled in the 
stove for supper yet. I am going to creep up to the 
door and see what Mother is about." Suppressing the 
desire to lustily shout, “ Mother, where are you” 
Lizzie noiselessly crept up the stairway, her foot falls 
hushed by the thick hit-and-miss rag carpeting that 
covered the steps. Stealthily peering through the nar¬ 
row crack in the door, she saw her Mother standing by 
the bed, on which she had spread her best dress, a black 
alpaca, that had been worn to church and on visiting, 
wedding, and funeral occasions, for over fifteen years. 
From where she stood, Lizzie could plainly see the 
tired, careworn look, as she stood critically examining 
the rusty, fragged garment. The basque was thrown 
over the foot of the high-pcsted oaken bed-stead, and 
the shining thread-bare creases and seams in sleeves and 
waist, did not escape Lizzie’s notice. 
“ How I wish Mother could have a handsome soft 
black cashmere dress, like Mrs. Dr. Mann's,” she 
thought, as she watched her Mother hanging the poor, 
shabby garment in the closet again, and heard a patient, 
long-drawn sigh. “ It's a shame for Mother to wear 
such an old fright of a dress. I do wish we weren't so 
awfully poor.” 
Her mother was so long in the closet, Lizzie had time- 
to softly descend the stairs, and get the supper well un¬ 
der way, before Mrs. Dane came down with the habitual 
sweet, patient expression on her pale face, and Lizzie, 
glancing up from the broiling cook-stove, over which 
she was at work, whispered to herself, “ Mother’s been 
praying over her dress trial.” 
When the supper dishes had been cleared away, the 
men gone into the hay fields again, and her Mother 
quietly knitting in the porch doorway, Lizzie stole 
away in the darkened, quiet parlor, again, to have a 
“ good think.” 
She threw herself on to the old. slippery hair-cloth 
sofa, with her head and shoulders abrubtly elevated by 
the sofa’s awkward, uncomfortable arm. She did not 
.notice its torturing angles. She did not notice a ray of 
beautiful sunlight that stole in through a chink under 
the curtain. Hooding the walls with a golden painting 
on which fluttered beautiful leaf shadows from the 
trees waving and rustling without. 
She did not notice the air castle of straw and bits of 
gay flannel, that hung just over her head, nor the fat, 
sleepy spider, roused from a week’s nap, by the sunlight, 
that began to lazily lower himself down from the dustv, 
straw ornament. 
She was thinking, “ desperately thinking,” she would 
have said, how she could secure or cam for her 
Mother a new black cashmere dress. 
•‘To think my sweet, precious Mother has to wear to 
church that shabby old thing, shining with age and 
ridiculously out of fashion, while all her neighbors have 
pretty, stylish dresses, and she more of a lady than any¬ 
one of them.” 
To shut out the vision of Mrs. Dr. Mann’s rich satin 
trimmed skirts, and in painful contrast, her Mothers 
short-waisted, white seamed basque, and funny, volup¬ 
tuous overskirt, the sensitive, loving daughter, buried 
her face in her hands. 
“Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat; 
neither for your body what ye put on.” 
Through the closed doors came the drowsy, droning 
sound of some one reading aloud, and she knew her 
mother was comforting her tired spirit with passages of 
Scripture as she knit in the porch door-way. The 
strong, cheery words of the blessed chapter comforted 
the daughters vexed spirit also, and over and over she 
repeated, “ Your Father knoweth you have need of 
these things,” and humbly prayed for guidance, if there 
was anything for her to do to bring the grant of these 
needs about. 
A soft touch on her clasped hands and she started up. 
almost expecting an angel had come to tell her wliat 
to do; but it was not an angel, neither was it the spider, 
whose web swung exactly over her, but it was a little 
pmk, everlasting flower, jarred from the swaying castle 
by the gyrations of the spider. 
Lizzie had taken a deal of pains with her straw flow¬ 
ers in the spring,starting them in boxes by the kitchen 
stove long before che snow was off, and to repay her 
painstaking, she now had a large number of healthy 
plants in her garden, that were commencing to bloom 
freely. She gathered them as fast as they opened, 
the dainty pink and white flowers of the Acroc- 
liniums. and gorgeous colors and shades of color 
of the Heliclirysums. To what use she would put 
so many flowers, when the buds had all opened, she 
had not given a thought; but the little pink messenger, 
dropping from its swaying, airy perch, brought an in¬ 
spiration with it, an inspiration so brimful of hope and 
stirring impulses, that when Lizzie left the parlor, she 
closed its door with such a rush and bang, the drooping 
mantle grasses dropped their furred coats of dust, and 
little white fluffy balls of thistle-down and fire-weed 
went floating through the room 
All through the summer and fall months, until sharp 
frosts killed her straw plants, Lizzie dally plufked the 
