hstone may you bloom,
With smiles of love your father greet,
And fill your mother's vacant seat.

THE CULTIVATION OF FLOWERS.

Where can we find a more healthy and delightful employment, than the
cultivation of flowers? Though of less importance than those plants
which are necessary for the support of animal life, yet, rightly
considered, they yield a pleasant and instructive entertainment for the
intellectual powers, and may justly be termed food for the mind.

"Nonsense" some of our readers exclaim, "Nonsense, to talk of feeding
the immortal mind, with flowers! For one, I think people may find some
more useful employment than that of persuading their fellow beings to
spend the precious hours of this _short_ life upon these useless
playthings."

But pause, my readers, and consider who gave this finishing touch to the
face of nature. Who strewed the fields with flowers? Were they not
brought into existence by the same All-wise Being who created the earth
upon which we dwell, with its millions of intelligent beings, its vast
oceans, its towering mountains, its flaming volcanoes and its majestic
rivers with their awe inspiring cataracts; who created the sun, that
great fountain of light and heat, and the centre of attraction for those
vast globes which revolve around it, and then counterpoised with such
precision the different forces which produce and continue their motion,
that they continue to perform their appointed revolutions, without the
least deviation from that orbit, in which they were placed at creation's
dawn; who "made the stars also," that innumerable multitude of fixed
stars, or suns with their attending planets which inhabit the boundless
regions of space; whose wonderful works are so numerous as to overwhelm
the feeble mind of man, and to compel him to conclude at the
commencement, by saying that they are infinite? And shall we be so
impious as to hush the voice of reason, and disregard the words of holy
writ enough to say, that even the little violet was made in vain? I
should sooner believe that Washington, the father of our country, while
the destiny of our nation was placed, as it were, in his hands, was in
the habit of deserting his army while on the battle field, engaged in
the most bloody conflict with a mortal foe, for the sole purpose of
amusing himself with soap bubbles and firebrand ribbons.

"But," says one, "they were created for a scourge and a snare to fallen
man; for whi