cost of a fair-sized bed would be considerable, but if
they are things that by care will endure, it is something to save up
for, _when the rose bed is completed_--take note of that!

When Bart came home this afternoon, he walked through the rooms before
going out and commented on the different flowers, entirely simple in
arrangement, and lingered over them, touching and taking pleasure in
them in a way wholly different from last week, when each room was a
jungle and I was fairly suffering from flower surfeit.

Now I find myself taking note of happy combinations of colour in other
people's gardens and along the highways for further experiments. I seem
to remember looking over a list of flower combinations and suggestions
in your garden book. Will you lend it to me?

By the way, opal effects seem to circle about the place this season--the
sunsets, the farm-house windows, and finally that rainy night when we
were playing whist, when _The Man_, taking a pencil from his pocket,
pulled out a little chamois bag that, being loose at one end, shed a
shower of the unset stones upon the green cloth, where they lay winking
and blinking like so many fiery coals.

"Are you a travelling jeweler's shop?" quizzed Bart.

"No," replied _The Man_, watching the stones where they lay, but not
attempting to pick them up; "the opal is my birth stone, and I've
always had a fancy for picking them up at odd times and carrying them
with me for luck!"

"I thought that they are considered unlucky," said Maria, holding one in
the palm of her hand and watching the light play upon it.

"That is as one reads them," said _The Man_; "to me they are
occasionally contradictory, that is all; otherwise they represent
adaptation to circumstances, and inexpensive beauty, which must always
be a consolation."

Then he gave us each one, "to start a collection," he said. I shall have
mine set as a talisman for the Infant. I like this new interpretation of
the stone, for to divine beauty in simple things is a gift equal to
genius.

Maria, however, insisted upon giving an old-fashioned threepenny bit,
kept as a luck penny in the centre of her purse, in exchange. How can
any woman be so devoid of even the little sentiment of gifts as she is?

A moment later _The Man from Everywhere_ electrified us by saying, in
the most casual manner, "Now that we are on the subject of opals, did I
tell you that, being in some strange manner drawn to the place, I have
mad