finely cut, flaring vase holding two perfect stems, each bearing half a dozen lily buds and blossoms.  These random bulbs are the first lilies of my own planting.  There are a few stalks of the white Madonna lilies in the grass of the old garden and a colony of tiger lilies and an upright red lily with different sort of leaves, all clustered at the root, following the tumble-down wall, the rockery to be.  I am fascinated by these Japanese lilies and desire more, each stalk is so sturdy, each flower so beautifully finished and set with jewels and then powdered with gold, as it were.  Pray tell me something about the rest of the family!  Do they come within my range and pocket, think you?  The first cost of a fair-sized bed would be considerable, but if they are things that by care will endure, it is something to save up for, when the rose bed is completed—­take note of that!

When Bart came home this afternoon, he walked through the rooms before going out and commented on the different flowers, entirely simple in arrangement, and lingered over them, touching and taking pleasure in them in a way wholly different from last week, when each room was a jungle and I was fairly suffering from flower surfeit.

Now I find myself taking note of happy combinations of colour in other people’s gardens and along the highways for further experiments.  I seem to remember looking over a list of flower combinations and suggestions in your garden book.  Will you lend it to me?

By the way, opal effects seem to circle about the place this season—­the sunsets, the farm-house windows, and finally that rainy night when we were playing whist, when The Man, taking a pencil from his pocket, pulled out a little chamois bag that, being loose at one end, shed a shower of the unset stones upon the green cloth, where they lay winking and blinking like so many fiery coals.

“Are you a travelling jeweler’s shop?” quizzed Bart.

“No,” replied The Man, watching the stones where they lay, but not attempting to pick them up; “the opal is my birth stone, and I’ve always had a fancy for picking them up at odd times and carrying them with me for luck!”

“I thought that they are considered unlucky,” said Maria, holding one in the palm of her hand and watching the light play upon it.

“That is as one reads them,” said The Man; “to me they are occasionally contradictory, that is all; otherwise they represent adaptation to circumstances, and inexpensive beauty, which must always be a consolation.”

Then he gave us each one, “to start a collection,” he said.  I shall have mine set as a talisman for the Infant.  I like this new interpretation of the stone, for to divine beauty in simple things is a gift equal to genius.

Maria, however, insisted upon giving an old-fashioned threepenny bit, kept as a luck penny in the centre of her purse, in exchange.  How can any woman be so devoid of even the little sentiment of gifts as she is?