nd 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 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 nerve