not have thought it calculated to charm you so greatly.  However, you may have some associations connected with it; liking is a very complex and many-motived thing....

We went through the fish and fruit markets the other day; unfortunately it was rather late in the morning, and of course the glory of the market was over, but yet there remained enough to enchant us, with their abundant plenteousness of good things.  The fruit-market was beautiful; fruit-baskets half as high as I am, placed in rows of a dozen, filled with peaches, and painted of a bright vermilion color, which throws a ruddy becoming tint over the downy fruit.  It looked like something in the “Arabian Nights;” heaps, literally heaps of melons, apples, pears, and wild grapes, in the greatest profusion.  I was enchanted with the beautiful forms, bright colors, and fragrant smell, but I saw no flowers, and I have seen hardly any since I have been here, which is rather a grief to me....

Americans are the most extravagant people in the world, and flowers are among them objects of the most lavish expenditure.  The prices paid for nosegays, wreaths, baskets, and devices of every sort of hot-house plants, are incredible to any reasonable mind.  At parties and balls ladies are laden with costly nosegays which will not even survive the evening’s fatigue of carrying them.  Dinner and luncheon parties are adorned, not only with masses of exquisite bloom as table ornaments, but by every lady’s plate a magnificent nosegay of hot-house flowers is placed; and I knew a lady who, wishing to adorn her ballroom with rather more than usual floral magnificence, had it hung round with garlands of white camellias and myosotis.

At the theater enormously expensive nosegays and huge baskets of forced flowers are handed to the favorite performers from the front of the house, till the ceremony becomes embarrassing, and almost ridiculous for the object of the demonstration.  The churches at certain festivals are hung with draperies of costly hot-house flowers; the communion-tables heaped with them.  Weddings, of course, are natural occasions for that species of ornament, but in America funerals are as flowery as marriage-feasts; and I have seen there in mid-winter, with the thermometer at fifteen degrees below zero, large crosses, and hearts, and wreaths, made entirely of rosebuds and lilies of the valley, as part of the solemnities of a burial service; and a young girl who died in the flowerless season was not only shrouded in blossoms, but as her coffin was carried to the bosom of the wintry earth, a white pall of the finest material was thrown over it, with a great cross of double forced violets, almost the length of the coffin, laid on it.  I have had as many as a dozen huge baskets of camellias, violets, orange-flower, and tuberose, at one time, in my room; perishable tokens of anonymous public and private favor, the cost of which used to fill me