ld. The
flowers are heavily fragrant, like gardenias, and are almost too sweet
for the house; but they, together with violets, give the garden the
opulence of odour before the lilacs are open, or the heliotropes that
are to be perfumers-in-chief in summer have graduated from thumb pots in
the forcing houses.

[Illustration: THE POET'S NARCISSUS.]

Unless one has a large garden and a gardener who can plant and tend
parterres of spring colour, I do not set much value upon outdoor
hyacinths; they must be lifted each year and often replaced, as the
large bulbs soon divide into several smaller ones with the flowers
proportionately diminished. To me their mission is, to be grown in pots,
shallow pans, or glasses on the window ledge, for winter and spring
comforters, and I use the early tulips much in the same way, except for
a cheerful line of them, planted about the foundation of the house, that
when in bloom seems literally to lift home upon the spring wings of
resurrection!

All my tulip enthusiasm is centred in the late varieties, and chief
among these come the fascinating and fantastic "parrots."

When next I have my garden savings-bank well filled, I am going to make
a collection of these tulips and guard them in a bed underlaid with
stout-meshed wire netting, so that no mole may leave a tunnel for the
wicked tulip-eating meadow-mouse.

It is these late May-flowering tulips of long stalks, like wands of tall
perennials, that you can gather in your arms and arrange in your largest
jars with a sense at once combined of luxury and artistic joy.

Better begin as I did by buying them in mixture; the species you must
choose are the bizarre, bybloems, parrots, breeders, Darwin tulips, and
the rose and white, together with a general mixture of late singles.
Five dollars will buy you fifty of each of the seven kinds, three
hundred and fifty bulbs all told and enough for a fine display. The
Darwin tulips yield beautiful shades of violet, carmine, scarlet, and
brown; the bizarres, many curious effects in stripes and flakes; the
rose and white, delicate frettings and margins of pink on a white
ground; but the parrots have petals fringed, twisted, beaked, poised
curiously upon the stalks, splashed with reds, yellows, and green, and
to come suddenly upon a mass of them in the garden is to think for a
brief moment that a group of unknown birds blown from the tropics in a
forced migration have alighted for rest upon the bending