Take the good when you lose the best. I know some people who grow hyacinths in earth instead of water for winter flowering, and always discard them in spring as soon as flowering time is over, under the impression that they will not bloom again. This is a great mistake, for though the spikes of the second growth are smaller, they are very useful and pleasant to look at in spring if planted in out of the way nooks and corners to surprise us the next spring time. I find that the bulbs that have been grown in water are more exhausted, but if they have been fairly planted in good earth and allowed to dry off gradually after blossoming time there will be a sure reward.

My own box is like a miniature garden, being in a box covered on the outside with birch bark, filled with sandy loam, and the bulbs planted for effect, the taller spikes to the center and a border of miniature hyacinths along the edge. The pretty little grape hyacinth fills in the corners.

Scillas and snowdrops soon recover and go on blooming during after years, and tulips are not long recruiting. It is a wonderful flower, this hyacinth, and a general favorite, though many economical people think it an expensive flower because it will not bloom the second year in the house. That is too much to expect; there is surely some spot out of doors where they can be planted, and return again after many days. It seems strange in looking over any catalogue, to see the list of varieties that have been raised since the sixteenth century when there was only four sorts, the double blue, purple and violet, and the single. There is one special convenience about this plant for the house - it is less affected by changes of temperature than any other and will even stand a slight degree of freezing. I have often tried to get the English blue-bell, Hyacinthus nottrscriptus, but have never found it in any seedman's catalogue. In England it grows in woods and copses, by the side of ditches, bank of streams and elsewhere, and has beautiful drooping bells that are of an intense deep blue, growing only on one side of the stem. The bulbs are often sought for to make starch.

In the language of flowers the colored hyacinth means "play" sport, while a white flower signifies " unobtrusive loveliness." The old bulbs of our window garden generally gives us pretty little spikes the third year when planted out of doors, and then seem to decay and disappear. Annie L. Jack.

[Our forefathers had quite a variety of hyacinths also. In 1612 a curious work was published in France by a monk, Louis Liger d' Auxerre, which was, as the publisher informs us, "newly done into English" in 1706. He tells us that "the hyacinth of several colors is one of the prettiest flowers that is. Its flowers grow in the form of little cups, and rise out of certain parts which resemble little narrow pipes, and when these flowers are blown they are turned in, and so represent a sort of lily. Nature seems to have formed them with intent to raise the admiration of spectators. The hyacinths multiply, as well as many other flowers, by the seed sown, as is hereafter directed. The bulbs that spring from it do not yield flowers till the fourth year, and are not always of the same color with the hyacinths that bore the seed; for, oftentimes from a white hyacinth we raise a red one, or a white one from a red one." Those who have tried it say that if the flowers from bulbs that have bloomed in the house, are plucked off in the bud for four years, the fifth year bulb is nearly as good as the original.

Thomas Meehan].