No, Mrs. Evan, I am convinced by so short a trial as two weeks that the art of arranging flowers for the house is first, your plan of having some to greet the guest as he enters, a bit of colour or coolness in each room where we pause to read or work or chat, and a table garnishing to render aesthetic the aspect and surroundings of the human animal at his feeding time; otherwise, except at special seasons of festivity, a surplus of flowers in the house makes for restlessness, not peace.  Two days ago I had thirty-odd vases and jars filled with flowers, and I felt, as I sat down to sew, as if I was trespassing in a bazaar!  Also, if there are too many jars of various flowers in one room, it is impossible that each should have its own individuality.

To-day I began my new plan.  I put away a part of my jars and vases and deliberately thought out what flowers I would use before gathering them.

The day being overcast though not threatening, merely the trail, as it were, of the storm that had passed, and the den being on the north side of the house and finished in dark woodwork and furniture, I gathered nasturtiums in three shades for it, the deep crimson, orange-scarlet, and canary-yellow, but not too many—­a blue-and-white jar of the Chinese “ginger” pattern for one corner of the mantel-shelf, and for the Japanese well buckets, that are suspended from the central hanging lamp by cords, a cascade of blossoms of the same colour still attached to their own fleshy vines and interspersed with the foliage.  Strange as it may seem, this little bit of pottery, though of a peculiar deep pink, harmonizes wonderfully well with the barbaric nasturtium colours.  There seems to be a kind of magic blended with the form and colour of these buckets, plain and severe in shape, that swing so gracefully from their silken cords, for they give grace to every flower that touches them.  When filled with stiff stalks of lilies-of-the-valley or tulips, they have an equally distinguished air as when hung with the bells of columbines or garlands of flowering honeysuckles twisted about the cords climbing quite up to the lamp.

In the hall I placed my tallest green-glass jar upon the greeting table and filled it with long stalks of red and gold Canada lilies from the very bottom of Amos Opie’s field, where the damp meadow-grass begins to make way for tussocks and the marshy ground begins.

The field now is as beautiful as a dream; the early grasses have ripened, and above them, literally by the hundreds,—­rank, file, regiment, and platoon,—­stand these lilies, some stalks holding twenty bells, ranged as regularly as if the will of man had set them there, and yet poised so gracefully that we know at once that no human touch has placed them.  I wish that you could have stood with me in the doorway of the camp and looked across that field this morning.  Bart declared the sight to be the first extra dividend upon our payment to Amos Opie for leaving the grass uncut.