piled on mountain, or expect Hercules to answer your call for help, when God has given you a brain and two hands. Lay your own corner stone and let it be business grafted with character. Labor always was, and ever will be, honorable. You have but to dignify your task and work as well as pray, ever remembering, as Shakespeare tells us: ""Tis true` the world was made for Ceasar, but for Titus, too." If born on a farm, do not forsake the occupation of agriculture or horticulture, thinking to find a more exalted calling. Do not make the mistake of giving a life of independence for a stewardship to men. Even the godesses, Ceres, Flora, and Pomona, will crown you in your inherited calling and you will be the freer, happier, nobler man. Those who live upon our farms are the reserve force of this great nation. Rome fell because her voters were only loafers, and citizens; they could sell their votes, as they had no homes to protect. But whatever profession you choose, be confident you will not fail if you understand it. With a thorough knowledge of your business, and a continual pruning and grafting in season you will succeed. Will you fail to seize the opportunity for employment, when the want of it causes hundreds in our land to cry for help? Neither will you say, "heaven is unkind to man, and man alone. Shall he alone whom rational we call, be pleased with nothing, if not blessed with all?" You are But we will look If so, we will not class you among our friends. too ungrateful. You are like the base Judean who threw away a pearl richer than all his tribe.” around us for those whose actions render forever sweet mem. ories. Those who are grafted with industry, hope, energy, duty, love, and all those qualities which make life worth living. But you say it is in vain you ask me to take upon myself such a load of business, there will be no happiness in life. Indeed, sir! But, please excuse me for saying you are very much like the man across the way. He, too, was afraid there would be no happiness in life for him. He did not attempt to buy a farm for fear he could not enjoy life if obliged to meet the payments, so he just rented one. It was much less trouble. He did not try to raise stock, for while it would nearly take care of itself in summer, he was afraid there might be bad storms in winter, and surely would be cold weather. So he kept a cow to supply milk for the family. Butterine was much cheaper than real butter. He had a team and an extra horse to "go for the mail with,” he said; but we couldn't see why he was to so much expense to get the mail as he took only a weekly paper. Some said he was waiting for "his ship to come in," and expected a letter from a seaport town. He did not have a garden because cucumbers were liable to give one the cholera morbus, and onions made his wife's breath smell; he thought a potato patch was enough. Fruit, he said, was a nuisance on the farm of a man who had daughters, because they used it to tempt the young men with, but they were not to blame for that, they inherited it from Mother Eve. Flowers were still worse, for they created a desire to have a wedding, that they might have a chance to display their taste for decoration. So, like yourself, he carefully guarded against everything that would create more business than pleasure for him. He has lived on one rented farm and then another for twenty years without once pruning or grafting for his ideal happiness. A few years ago, when his neighbor's daughter went to the university, his went to the city to work in a laundry, and this winter when his neighbor's two sons came to Madison to take the agricultural course, I said to him: What are your sons doing? "Oh, tinkering around at most any thing they can get to do," he replied. The difference in the kind of happiness the two families enjoyed need not be described. Do you not now begin to realize there is a false and a true happiness, as there is in all things in creation, and if we would be true to ourselves we need to know one from the other. Varro enumerates seven hundred kinds, and Pope thus describes some of them: "The learned is happy, nature to explore. The poor contents him with the care of heaven, The starving chemist in his golden views, See some strange happiness every state attends. It Truly the happiness which will create in you a desire for business, for activity, for knowledge is the priceless kind. is the kind you and I are to count above all price, and is the result of honest toil in any vocation chosen. Other things being equal, toil will make you, not simply a man in form, a sham in life, but a reality. And if the temple of life you are building shall be a success, you must deny yourself many times where you indulge once. If your advantages have been small, if you take root in the world, spring up, and send forth branches so broad that your aged father and mother, a womanly woman, and a family of bright young lives all find shelter there, you have filled a glorious mission. Let West bring his brush, and Phidias his chisel, for art and sculpture can find no grander subject. It has been said that every day is a little life, and our whole life is but a day repeated. If so, how dare we misspend it, for if your ambition leads you to desire a mountain of wealth, you can only form it by successive strata of rock and, Columbus like, you must catch sight of the floating seaweed if you would bestow confidence. Do not despise economy, it will give you cheerfulness, health and ease; but never mistake stinginess for economy, they are not even sisters. Economy never denies us the comforts or necessaries of life, but many a flippy floppy feather (like the political rooster) you will be glad economy never allowed you to wear. I would not have you think that wealth makes the man, but that the possession of it affords him opportunity for culture, independence, and the satisfaction of acquirement; but better than all, it grafts him with industry, thrift and good sense, enabling him to multiply the loaves and fishes. And while I would not care to lead the life of Silas Marner, yet we frequently see the other extreme causing much greater crime and misery. I regret that the trend of the age is much more to the lavish use of wealth for the gratification of society. Lady Henry Somerset's appeal to the strikers at Chicago brought from a local daily this reply: "Many young men think if they were only a clerk like Marshall Field they might have his success, but the facts are, if they get $1,000 salary, they spend it." They fail to join the better elements of society, fail to save half their earnings. Most of them go ahead and spend all their wages until twenty-five or thirty years have passed away, then marry, with no home or any thing to start in life with. Their responsibility is great. No doubt their lot will be hard. The fault is their own. If men and women would, in a quiet way, try to lift up every man and woman they meet to a higher plain, that is by teaching them to save their earnings in order to become capitalists, they would soon elevate society. And with the seed of thrift sown in the young man's nature, before he asks a woman to forsake all her past, and with him share all the responsibili'ties, duties, trials and pleasures in life, there will be a ray of hope, that he will not destroy the confidence which his love inspired. And if some true friend has sown the seed of industry, energy, and self denial in the woman's heart, she, by continual pruning and grafting, will keep him from going in the wrong direction. And should a calamity overtake him, he, like the man who lost his marble mansion, will put up a pine shed and write thereon: "All gone, but wife and home." They will not take advantage of the disaster or the hard times to force themselves on the charity of others. May we hasten the time when more real, living happiness shall exist, and "whatsoever our hands find to do" we may do it, as there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in the grave. The season for pruning and grafting will be o'er. FLOWERS. Dora Haviland, Madison. Those things which are useful and beautiful are good for life. Every one admits that that which is useful to us in our daily vocations is good, but it is to be lamented, that there are so many living on God's earth who treat some of His most beautiful gifts slightingly, as if they were of no use. It is very difficult to draw a line between the useful and beautiful, for as civilization advances, implements which were once crude are now made artistic. But if it were possible to take away all that is beautiful in the world from the useful, would our lives be more satisfactory? They certainly would not. All the beautiful things in this world were made for man to enjoy, and if he does not enjoy them it is his fault. This earth was created for man, and all its elements for his convenience. He was not intended to be a slave, to serve the elements. Those people who avoid all the luxuries of life are not making any noble sacrifice, they only slight God's gifts. All the greatest luxuries are the most common and if we could thoroughly enjoy the events of each day our lives would be so taken up with pleasure that we would not have time to worry about the luxuries which we are not permitted to enjoy. At present the flower garden seems to play a very small part in horticulture. Is this because flowers are less useful, therefore less needed? True the apple and grape furnish food, but should the search for food be the all absorbing interest in this civilized nineteenth century? Do we not need to feed our souls as well as our bodies? Flowers certainly do furnish us inspiration for noble thoughts; they seem to speak to us through the expression of their faces. Their meaning many able authors have tried to set forth in verse. The abundance of flowers in the spring time is invigorating to youth, and pleasing to old age. Some plants, like men, are widely known, while others are plants of their own locality. All flowers are beautiful, but they differ widely in their style of growth. They carry themselves as it were according to their birthright. |