children, and all her other
home-things,--her _heart_. She loves them; she lives in them; she has
in herself a plant-life and a plant-sympathy. She feels for them as
if she herself were a plant; she anticipates their wants,--always
remembers them without an effort, and so the care flows to them
daily and hourly. She hardly knows when she does the things that
make them grow, but she gives them a minute a hundred times a day.
She moves this nearer the glass,--draws that back,--detects some thief
of a worm on one,--digs at the root of another, to see why it
droops,--washes these leaves and sprinkles those,--waters, and
refrains from watering, all with the habitual care of love. Your
mother herself doesn't know why her plants grow; it takes a
philosopher and a writer for the 'Atlantic' to tell her what the cause
is."

Here I saw my wife laughing over her work-basket as she answered,--

"Girls, one of these days _I_ will write an article for the
'Atlantic,' that your papa need not have _all_ the say to himself;
however, I believe he has hit the nail on the head this time."

"Of course he has," said Marianne. "But, mamma, I am afraid to begin
to depend much on plants for the beauty of my rooms, for fear I should
not have your gift,--and, of all forlorn and hopeless things in a
room, ill-kept plants are the most so."

"I would not recommend," said I, "a young housekeeper, just beginning,
to rest much for her home ornament on plant-keeping, unless she has an
experience of her own love and talent in this line which makes her
sure of success; for plants will not thrive if they are forgotten or
overlooked, and only tended in occasional intervals; and, as Marianne
says, neglected plants are the most forlorn of all things."

"But, papa," said Marianne anxiously, "there, in those patent parlors
of John's that you wrote of, flowers acted a great part."

"The charm of those parlors of John's may be chemically analyzed," I
said. "In the first place, there is sunshine, a thing that always
affects the human nerves of happiness. Why else is it that people are
always so glad to see the sun after a long storm? why are bright days
matters of such congratulation? Sunshine fills a house with a thousand
beautiful and fanciful effects of light and shade,--with soft,
luminous, reflected radiances, that give picturesque effects to the
pictures, books, statuettes of an interior. John, happily, had no
money to buy brocatelle curtains, and, bes