, to
put it so that the shrewdest Yankee will understand it,--BEAUTY IS
THE CHEAPEST THING YOU CAN HAVE, because in many ways it is a
substitute for expense. A few vases of flowers in a room, a few
blooming, well-kept plants, a few prints framed in fanciful frames
of cheap domestic fabric, a statuette, a bracket, an engraving, a
pencil-sketch,--above all, a few choice books,--all these arranged by
a woman who has the gift in her finger-ends, often produce such an
illusion on the mind's eye that one goes away without once having
noticed that the cushion of the armchair was worn out, and that some
veneering had fallen off the centre-table.

"I have a friend, a schoolmistress, who lives in a poor little cottage
enough, which, let alone of the Graces, might seem mean and sordid,
but a few flower-seeds and a little weeding in the spring make it, all
summer, an object which everybody stops to look at. Her aesthetic soul
was at first greatly tried with the water-barrel which stood under the
eaves spout,--a most necessary evil, since only thus could her scanty
supply of soft water for domestic purposes be secured. One of the
Graces, however, suggested to her a happy thought. She planted a row
of morning-glories round the bottom of her barrel, and drove a row of
tacks around the top, and strung her water-butt with twine, like a
great harpsichord. A few weeks covered the twine with blossoming
plants, which every morning were a mass of many-colored airy blooms,
waving in graceful sprays, and looking at themselves in the water. The
water-barrel, in fact, became a celebrated stroke of ornamental
gardening, which the neighbors came to look at."

"Well, but," said Jenny, "everybody hasn't mamma's faculty with
flowers. Flowers will grow for some people, and for some they won't.
Nobody can see what mamma does so very much, but her plants always
look fresh and thriving and healthy,--her things blossom just when she
wants them, and do anything else she wishes them to; and there are
other people that fume and fuss and try, and their things won't do
anything at all. There's Aunt Easygo has plant after plant brought
from the greenhouse, and hanging-baskets, and all sorts of things; but
her plants grow yellow and drop their leaves, and her hanging-baskets
get dusty and poverty-stricken, while mamma's go on flourishing as
heart could desire."

"I can tell you what your mother puts into her plants," said
I,--"just what she has put into her