“So, if we could only understand,” she said in closing, while the girls listened earnestly, “that Easter is far more than a commemoration, that it is a condition of our hearts, then we should, I think, reverence the day rightly. For as beautiful as is the story of the risen Christ, we do not keep Easter sacred merely by the remembrance of that story. The risen Christ is as nothing to us unless in our own hearts the Christ spirit rises—the spirit of love and service, of unselfishness and goodness. When that spirit awakens within us, then comes our Easter day. It may be many days throughout the year; it might be—if we could only rightly appreciate our lives—it might be every day. For every day is a fresh beginning, an Easter day, when we may decide to cast off the old and to put on the new, the old habits of selfishness and jealousy, of insincerity and thoughtlessness—all those petty, little things that mar our lives; and to put on our new and whiter robes of unselfishness and simple sincerity. If the thousands who next Sunday morning will sing of the risen Christ, might all experience within themselves their own Easter mornings, then this world of ours would have realized its resurrection. “Let the hepaticas which you hold in your hands give you the only Easter lesson worth the learning—the lesson which your pagan forefathers in the forests of Germany taught their children centuries ago on their own Easter festival. You know how each spring the clusters beneath the pines are larger, if you are careful as you pick the blossoms not to disturb the roots. The long months of fall and winter are not months of sleep and rest for the hepaticas. Beneath the snow in the winter silence they are at work, sending out their rootlets through the brown earth, avoiding the rocks and sandy places, but taking firm hold upon that which will nourish them best. Thus do they grow year by year, at each Easter time showing themselves larger and more beautiful than the spring before.