We do not refer to the ground, but to the garden - qua garden. Let us, for once, sum the various ways in which it is made useful by diverse persons.

There are, first of all, those who like the gay colors of blooms, and enjoy the carpet garden or the little knot of annuals before a cottage, but have little specific liking for flowers. Next comes the gardener who has a fondness for varieties. He appreciates color and form, but has a genuine love for species and new beauties. The collector is a little more extreme. He discovers a lifelong, increasing interest in a single order and class of plants. If he has some scientific taste, then, like Mr. Darwin, he finds hours and days of rare enjoyment in observing and experimenting, hybridizing and raising seedlings, and arranging all sorts of traps for nature. The artist has only a little of any but the first kind of those various interests, but, with pencil and brush, sits, day after day, drawing and coloring a single bunch of flowers. Not far from where we write hangs a beautiful group of wild roses, the work of many long hours, and one can see at a glance what minute and newly discovered beauties this skillful, patient lover of flowers found in those green leaves, thorn-clad stems and delicately shaded petals. But even the artist does not exhaust the delight that is in flowers, for the poetic mind finds in them new and tender thoughts.

Like Burns' daisy, they speak a thousand things most difficult to say, and become a new half-human language. But all these classes of persons still leave unused that capacity of many human and noble hearts to love the individual flower and plant, not as a variety or a species, but as its own, tended by its care and loved because loving is natural and sweet to such hearts. Surely now, with all these persons in the garden, we have made the most of it - at least with their help. But no, the great Teacher stands before us and tells us how He has considered the lilies. Just so far as we fail to have any one of all these numerous interests in flowers and growing things, do we fail to make the most of the garden. We cannot have them all in great measure - but the artist's, for example : would not a little more training with the pencil in our youth have given us a greater appreciation of growing, graceful forms of leaves, vines and branches ? Could not our scientific curiosity and interest have been greater ? Could we not, even now, become collectors in a small way ? If we had done what Mr. Darwin, at the last, regretted sadly he had failed to do, namely, read a little in the best poets daily, would not our poetic interest be stronger and now afford us more of the honey of Hymettus ? Nay, if we loved the individual plant and its blossoms as does many a humble cottager, would not we find one of the sunniest, happiest spots of earth in our little garden.