o be a kind of magic blended with the form and colour of these
buckets, plain and severe in shape, that swing so gracefully from their
silken cords, for they give grace to every flower that touches them.
When filled with stiff stalks of lilies-of-the-valley or tulips, they
have an equally distinguished air as when hung with the bells of
columbines or garlands of flowering honeysuckles twisted about the cords
climbing quite up to the lamp.

In the hall I placed my tallest green-glass jar upon the greeting table
and filled it with long stalks of red and gold Canada lilies from the
very bottom of Amos Opie's field, where the damp meadow-grass begins to
make way for tussocks and the marshy ground begins.

The field now is as beautiful as a dream; the early grasses have
ripened, and above them, literally by the hundreds,--rank, file,
regiment, and platoon,--stand these lilies, some stalks holding twenty
bells, ranged as regularly as if the will of man had set them there, and
yet poised so gracefully that we know at once that no human touch has
placed them. I wish that you could have stood with me in the doorway of
the camp and looked across that field this morning. Bart declared the
sight to be the first extra dividend upon our payment to Amos Opie for
leaving the grass uncut.

I left the stalks of the lilies full three feet long and used only their
own foliage, together with some broad-leaved grasses, to break the too
abrupt edge of the glass. This is a point that must be remembered in
arranging flowers, the keeping the relative height and habit of the
plant in the mind's eye. These lilies, gathered with short stems and
massed in a crowded bunch, at once lose their individuality and become
mere little freckled yellow gamins of the flower world.

A rather slender jar or vase also gives an added sense of height;
long-stemmed flowers should never be put in a flat receptacle, no matter
how adroitly they may be held in place. Only last month I was called
upon to admire a fine array of long-stemmed roses that were held in a
flat dish by being stuck in wet sand, and even though this was covered
by green moss, the whole thing had a painfully artificial and embalmed
look, impossible to overcome.

For the living room, which is in quiet green tones and
chintz-upholstered wicker furniture, I gathered Shirley poppies. They
are not as large and perfectly developed as those I once saw in your
garden from fall-sown seed, but they are