A flower will fade at last be it tended ever so carefully. If we wish to preserve it dried we can best do so as soon as we bring it home, by placing it between sheets of absorbent paper (newspaper will do) well weighted down, the paper to be renewed if the plants are succulent and if there is any risk of mildew. But a dried plant after all is only a mummy. Its colours are gone; its form bruised and crumpled, gives only a faint suggestion of it as it lived and breathed. Other and more pleasant reminders of our summer rambles can be ours. With a camera of fair size it is easy to take pictures of flowers at their best; these pictures can be coloured in their natural tints with happy effect. In this art Mrs. Cornelius Van Brunt, of New York, has attained extraordinary success. Or, instead of the camera, why not at first invoke the brush and colour-box? Only a little skill in handling them is enough for a beginning. Practice soon increases deftness in this art as in every other, and in a few short weeks floral portraits are painted with a truth to nature denied the unaided pencil. For what flower, however meek and lowly, could ever tell its story in plain black and white? The amateur painter of flowers learns a good many things by the way; at the very outset, that drawing accurate and clear must be the groundwork of any painting worthy the name. Both in the use of pencil and brush there must be a degree of painstaking observation, wholesome as a discipline and delightful in its harvests. How many of us, unused to the task of careful observation, can tell the number of the musk-mallow's petals, or mark on paper the depth of fringe on a gentian, or match from a series of dyed silks the hues of a common buttercup? Drawing and painting sharpen the eye, and make the fingers its trained and ready servants. From the very beginning of one's task in limning bud and blossom, we see them richer in grace and loveliness than ever before. When wild flowers are sketched as they grow it is often easy to give them a new interest by adding the portraits of their insect servitors. Amateurs who are so fortunate as to visit the West Indies have an opportunity to paint the wonderful blossoms of the Marcgravia, whose minister, a humming bird, quivers above it like a bit of rainbow loosened from the sky.