I left the stalks of the lilies full three feet long and used only their own foliage, together with some broad-leaved grasses, to break the too abrupt edge of the glass.  This is a point that must be remembered in arranging flowers, the keeping the relative height and habit of the plant in the mind’s eye.  These lilies, gathered with short stems and massed in a crowded bunch, at once lose their individuality and become mere little freckled yellow gamins of the flower world.

A rather slender jar or vase also gives an added sense of height; long-stemmed flowers should never be put in a flat receptacle, no matter how adroitly they may be held in place.  Only last month I was called upon to admire a fine array of long-stemmed roses that were held in a flat dish by being stuck in wet sand, and even though this was covered by green moss, the whole thing had a painfully artificial and embalmed look, impossible to overcome.

For the living room, which is in quiet green tones and chintz-upholstered wicker furniture, I gathered Shirley poppies.  They are not as large and perfectly developed as those I once saw in your garden from fall-sown seed, but they are so delicately tinted and the petals so gracefully winged that it seemed like picking handfuls of butterflies.

Maria Maxwell has shown me how, by looking at the stamens, I can tell if the flower is newly opened, for by picking only such they will last two full days.  How lasting are youthful impressions!  She remembers all these things, though she has had no very own garden these ten years and more.  Will the Infant remember creeping into my cot in these summer mornings, cuddling and being crooned to like a veritable nestling, until her father gains sufficient consciousness to take his turn and delight her by the whistled imitation of a few simple bird songs?  Yes, I think so, and I would rather give her this sort of safeguard to keep off harmful thoughts and influences than any worldly wisdom.

The poppies I arranged in my smallest frosted-white and cut-glass vases in two rows on the mantel-shelf, before the quaint old oblong mirror, making it look like a miniature shrine.  Celia Thaxter had this way of using them, if I remember rightly, the reflection in the glass doubling the beauty and making the frail things seem alive!

For the library, where oak and blue are the prevailing tints, I filled a silver tankard with a big bunch of blue cornflowers, encircled by the leaves of “dusty miller,” and placed it on the desk.

The dining-room walls are of deep dark red that must be kept cool in summer.  At all seasons I try to have the table decorations low enough not to oblige us to peer at one another through a green mist, and to-day I made a wreath of hay-scented ferns and ruby-spotted Japan lilies (Speciosum rubrum, the tag says—­they were sent as extras with my seeds), by combining two half-moon dishes, and in the middle set a slender,