IT SEEMS strange at first thought that young children and women and old people should care more for flowers than do boys and middle-aged men, yet it is not strange. The spirit of flowers belongs to the calmer and tenderer virtues, and it is foreign to the restless boy who is fired with indefinite aspirations, and it is apt to find little room for lodgment in the mind of ambitious manhood. But when the years begin to soften passions and ambitions, the first love of the flowers begins to return, and it returns the more completely the more tender and careful the disposition. Youth and old age meet in many ways. It is a fond ideal of artists to picture the child upon the grandfather's knee or frisking by his side through the calm and shady fields. Nature, speaks to both, to one in some unknown and strange emotion which inspires a wonder of what the great world is and what it means, to the other with the sweetness and nearness of a friend. Both love the flowers because they appeal to their sentiments and emotions. Life begins and ends at the same point, in purity, emotion and love. To women flowers always appeal, because in them the fundamental affections are less obscured by ambitions and sin.

It is a hopeful sign if some of the tenderness and sweetness of childhood remains in the man, if the flowers and nature still retain of their old-time fragrance and wonder. "It is character that counts, after all".