Many a mother singing lullabies to the baby at her breast calls it her “blossom.”
And children, healthy children, are fond of flowers.
I once saw a boy of ten who didn’t know what a flower was. He knew what each card in a pack was, and he wasn’t afraid of a policeman. But he was afraid of a grassy and daisy-spangled field. London had destroyed for him all sense of kinship with Nature.
But most children, even city children, love flowers. The country child loves familiarly as it loves its own mother, but the city child loves and worships. Yesterday I saw a group of little girls with their noses pressed flat against a florist’s window. “My, ain’t they sweet!” they cried in chorus.
If only the flowers could know!
Some sympathetic and leisured ladies have formed themselves into a guild to give such children as I saw at the florist’s window growing flowers to tend and love. I do not know the ladies. We live in the same city, but in a different world.
And yet we have some things in common, these good ladies and I. Perhaps many things, but chief of all a love for children and flowers. In our different worlds, so little alike, this love flourishes with equal freedom. My wife loves blossoms and babies, too, but she is not a member of the guild. Its meetings are not held in our world.
The guild got together 10,000 little children from the tenements of this great city of New York. To each child a potted plant was given, in the hope that its presence would brighten the home, and its care “refine” and “spiritualize” the child.
Good, generous ladies of the guild!
And from each child was exacted the promise that upon a given date at the end of a full year, the plant should be brought back and placed upon exhibition. Ribbons were promised as prizes to those children whose plants should be in the most flourishing condition.