domestic purposes be secured.  One of the Graces, however, suggested to her a happy thought.  She planted a row of morning-glories round the bottom of her barrel, and drove a row of tacks around the top, and strung her water-butt with twine, like a great harpsichord.  A few weeks covered the twine with blossoming plants, which every morning were a mass of many-colored airy blooms, waving in graceful sprays, and looking at themselves in the water.  The water-barrel, in fact, became a celebrated stroke of ornamental gardening, which the neighbors came to look at.”

“Well, but,” said Jennie, “everybody hasn’t mamma’s faculty with flowers.  Flowers will grow for some people, and for some they won’t.  Nobody can see what mamma does so very much, but her plants always look fresh and thriving and healthy,—­her things blossom just when she wants them, and do anything else she wishes them to; and there are other people that fume and fuss and try, and their things won’t do anything at all.  There’s Aunt Easygo has plant after plant brought from the greenhouse, and hanging-baskets, and all sorts of things; but her plants grow yellow and drop their leaves, and her hanging-baskets get dusty and poverty-stricken, while mamma’s go on flourishing as heart could desire.”

“I can tell you what your mother puts into her plants,” said I,—­“just what she has put into her children, and all her other home-things,—­her heart.  She loves them; she lives in them; she has in herself a plant-life and a plant-sympathy.  She feels for them as if she herself were a plant; she anticipates their wants,—­always remembers them without an effort, and so the care flows to them daily and hourly.  She hardly knows when she does the things that make them grow,—­but she gives them a minute a hundred times a day.  She moves this nearer the glass,—­draws that back,—­detects some thief of a worm on one,—­digs at the root of another, to see why it droops,—­washes these leaves, and sprinkles those,—­waters, and refrains from watering, all with the habitual care of love.  Your mother herself doesn’t know why her plants grow; it takes a philosopher and a writer for the ‘Atlantic’ to tell her what the cause is.”

Here I saw my wife laughing over her work-basket as she answered,—­

“Girls, one of these days, I will write an article for the ‘Atlantic,’ that your papa need not have all the say to himself:  however, I believe he has hit the nail on the head this time.”

“Of course he has,” said Marianne.  “But, mamma, I am afraid to begin to depend much on plants for the beauty of my rooms, for fear I should not have your gift,—­and of all forlorn and hopeless things in a room, ill-kept plants are the most so.”

“I would not recommend,” said I, “a young housekeeper, just beginning, to rest much for her home-ornament on plant-keeping, unless she has an experience of her own love and talent in this line, which makes her sure of success; for plants will not thrive, if they are forgotten or overlooked, and only tended in occasional intervals; and, as Marianne says, neglected plants are the most forlorn of all things.”