Some flowers have such a hatred of man they cannot breathe and live in his presence, others have an equal love of human companionship. The white Clover clings here to our pathway as does the English Daisy across seas. And in our garden Ladies' Delights and Ambrosia tell us, without words, of their love for us and longing to be by our side; just as plainly as a child silently tells us his love and dependence on us by taking our hand as we walk side by side. There is not another gesture of childhood, not an affectionate word which ever touched my heart as did that trustful holding of the hand. One of my children throughout his brief life never walked by my side without clinging closely--I think without conscious intent--with his little hand to mine. I can never forget the affection, the trust of that vanished hand. I find that my dearest flower loves are the old flowers,--not only old to me because I knew them in childhood, but old in cultivation. "Give me the good old weekday blossoms I used to see so long ago, With hearty sweetness in their bosoms, Ready and glad to bud and blow." Even were they newcomers, we should speedily care for them, they are so lovable, so winning, so endearing. If I had seen to-day for the first time a Fritillaria, a Violet, a Lilac, a Bluebell, or a Rose, I know it would be a case of love at first sight. But with intimacy they have grown dearer still. The sense of long-continued acquaintance and friendship which we feel for many garden flowers extends to a few blossoms of field and forest. It is felt to an inexplicable degree by all New Englanders for the Trailing Arbutus, our Mayflower; and it is this unformulated sentiment which makes us like to go to the same spot year after year to gather these beloved flowers. I am sensible of this friendship for Buttercups, they seem the same flowers I knew last year; and I have a distinct sympathy with Owen Meredith's poem:-- "I pluck the flowers I plucked of old About my feet--yet fresh and cold The Buttercups do bend; The selfsame Buttercups they seem, Thick in the bright-eyed green, and such As when to me their blissful gleam Was all earth's gold--how much!" We have little of the intense sentiment, the inspiration which filled flower-lovers of olden times. We admire flowers certainly as beautiful works of nature, as objects of wonder in mechanism and in the profusion of growth, and we are occasionally roused to feelings of gratitude to the Maker and Giver of such beauty; but it is not precisely the same regard that the old gardeners and "flowerists" had, which is expressed in this quotation from Gerarde of "the gallant grace of violets":--