A beautiful ornament for a room with pictures is German ivy. Slips of this will start without roots in bottles of water. Slide the bottle behind the picture, and the ivy will seem to come from fairyland, and hang its verdure in all manner of pretty curves around the picture. It may then be trained to travel toward other ivy, and thus aid in forming green cornice along the ceiling. We have seen some rooms that had an ivy cornice around the whole, giving the air of a leafy bower. There are some other odd devices to ornament a room. For example, a sponge, kept wet by daily immersion, can be filled with flax-seed and suspended by a cord, when it will ere long be covered with verdure and afterward with flowers. A sweet potato, laid in a bowl of water on a bracket, or still better, suspended by a knitting-needle, run through or laid across the bowl half in the water, will, in due time, make a beautiful verdant ornament. A large carrot, with the smallest half cut off, scooped out to hold water and then suspended with cords, will send out graceful shoots in rich profusion. Half a cocoa-nut shell, suspended, will hold earth or water for plants and make a pretty hanging-garden. It may be a very proper thing to direct the ingenuity and activity of children into the making of hanging-baskets and vases of rustic work. The best foundations are the cheap wooden bowls, which are quite easy to get, and the walks of children in the woods can be made interesting by their bringing home material for this rustic work. Different colored twigs and sprays of trees, such as the bright scarlet of the dog-wood, the yellow of the willow, the black of the birch, and the silvery gray of the poplar, may be combined in fanciful net-work. For this sort of work, no other investment is needed than a hammer and an assortment of different-sized tacks, and beautiful results will be produced. Fig. 46 is a stand for flowers, made of roots, scraped and varnished. But the greatest and cheapest and most delightful fountain of beauty is a "Ward case." [Illustration: Fig 46.] Now, immediately all our economical friends give up in despair. Ward's cases sell all the way along from eighteen to fifty dollars, and are, like every thing else in this lower world, regarded as the sole perquisites of the rich. Let us not be too sure. Plate-glass, and hot-house plants, and rare patterns, _are_ the especial inheritance of the rich; but any family may command all the requisites of a Ward case for a very small sum. Such a case is a small glass closet over a well-drained box of soil. You make a Ward case on a small scale when you turn a tumbler over a plant. The glass keeps the temperature moist and equable, and preserves the plants from dust, and the soil being well drained, they live and thrive accordingly. The requisites of these are the glass top and the bed of well-drained soil.