“It has come to me through my association with these working girls that the meagerness of their lives does not so much mean the lack of _things_ as the lack of _thoughts_, and I have been planning these talks which have been running through the winter in answer to the question ‘What shall we think about?’ I have asked every one to make the talk simple and plain and I have tried to impress upon them that it is to be _only_ a talk, not a lecture. I have also sought for simple themes, so that they need not be so far above the comprehension of the untrained minds that it would find no answering chord in their desires. If we can take the every-day things which you and I know are full of a wonderful interest, if one but know how to see them, and open their eyes to their wonders, I have believed that one would be opening doors into an undreamed-of fairy land to them. So you see why I come to you. You are one of the door-keepers into that fairy land. Will you open it for us?” This desire to inform others kept him wholly free from anything like pedantry. He had none of the self-importance of men who try to make a little knowledge go a great way. Nor was he forgetful of the difficulties of less instructed minds. His style in picture and in speech was simple and direct. He had no passion for long words. He did not find it necessary to befog others with the technical speech of the specialists. He was the friend of children and simple country folk and the unlearned everywhere; and they will owe him a debt of gratitude that he spoke in their language and made them understand him. “I wonder,” he once said, “if the time will ever come when a man may read a botanical work without understanding Latin.” It was one of his ambitions to write such a book; he meant to make a botany in English, and illustrate it himself. Over fifteen hundred drawings, as we have seen, are in existence which he had accumulated with this work in view,--one more of the many schemes that fertile mind was projecting, never, alas! to be carried out.