Hints for Arranging Elowers. 
489* 
shall either be living spokes in the wheel of progress, or lifeless ob¬ 
structions in the ascending and consequently difficult path. To 
work and to help others to work with increasing freedom and suc¬ 
cess will insure continuous progress. Living then, not to work r 
but working to live, in the highest sense, our lives will be ennobled, 
and we shall share in the honor and blessedness of that world-wide- 
fraternity—the great brotherhood of toil. 
HINTS FOR ARRANGING FLOWERS. 
MRS. H. M. LEWIS, MADISON. 
No home can be made truly beautiful without flowers. No mat¬ 
ter how elegant the rosewood furniture, the damask curtain, the 
rare picture, or costly statuary, if flowers are not there, to the per¬ 
son of truly refined taste, the eye wanders away dissatisfied, and 
longs for something more; let bouquets of flowers, pots of thrifty 
growing plants be interspersed among these elegancies, and home 
becomes the most beautiful and enjoyable spot upon earth. Yes, 
flowers, ye are always welcome, welcome in sickness or health, 
welcome in prosperity or adversity, welcome to the marriage- 
feast, or house of death, welcome to our cradle, to our altar, 
to our grave. The love for flowers is largely on the increase 
among our people. In time, we bid fair to rival the French or 
English in decorating our public and private houses with them. 
In New York and Washington, we already know, that upon a 
single grand wedding, dinner-party, or reception occasion, thou¬ 
sands of dollars are expended for flowers; floral wedding-bells 
are sometimes sold for two hundred dollars, and baskets of cut 
flowers for fifty dollars, about holiday times, when choice flowers 
are scarce. In the New York papers we read that the u lovely Miss 
S-is dead; five carriage-loads of fragrant flowers followed her 
to the tomb.” Twenty-five years ago a bouquet of flowers was 
rarely seen in winter, and in summer, only the common ones were 
cultivated. Now florists are reaching out to the gardens of the 
east and the prairies of the west, in fact to all parts of the world 
for rarities. To our horticultural societies we are largely indebted 
