Glorious Lilies! Stainless and sweet, they spring from a sacred soil, wet with the life-blood of brave men and the tears of noble women! They are the Children of France and of the Future!--the gracious youth of a happier day, when tyranny and fear are past, and when Peace of the highest and purest is the canopy of safety and honour, under which the nation may rest after long and bitter strife! The Lilies of girlhood and boyhood; the Children, some of them deprived of fathers and mothers, but never entirely orphaned because France is their closest parentage! Oh, beautiful human blossoms, growing up like buds of snow from the black smoke and ashes of battle fires!--we thank God for you, and we pray that you may expand in happy fragrance, nourished by the fresh air of freedom, so that the sufferings your heroic fathers have endured for France may be transformed into joys for you! You are the hope and glory of your land, you fair flowers which even now are beginning to bloom innocently in the dust of many graves; you will be the radiant and triumphant France of coming years, when your wealth of splendid youth and victory shall flame a white aurora against skies of heavenly blue, undarkened by any cloud of treachery! Children of France!--Lilies that grow around the standard of Liberty!--we commend you to the Future in faith and in hope! Not without some natural sorrow, for, alas! your garden is the graveyard of many loves!--but though we weep, our tears are tears of pride that those whom we have lost are fallen in honour, and that the blood from which you draw your sustenance is unpolluted by so much as one drop of traitor’s gall! So shall you rise nobly, on stately stems of heroic ancestry and memory to make France once more an earthly paradise, and in the very fairness of your youth we shall see reflected the light of the dauntless spirits that have fought and passed away, leaving you with us as their most precious legacy, which we accept with gratitude--which we keep with all tenderness--holding you reverently to our hearts as the “Annunciation” Lilies of a New Gospel! “WHOSO SHALL RECEIVE ONE SUCH LITTLE CHILD!” (_Written on behalf of St. Nicholas Home for “Raid-shock” Children at Chailry, Sussex_)