"Yes, and labor and knowledge."
Here the flower lecture ended, for we were at the greenhouse gates. In another moment a door was opened, and we were ushered into a world of beauty.
"How lovely!" cried Nell, looking down the green aisles of the "azalea house."
"They look like swarms of great white butterflies among the dark leaves," remarked Harry.
"Or giant snow-flakes ready to melt or blow away," suggested Nell.
"If you call those white azaleas so handsome, I wonder what you will say to these!" exclaimed the florist, opening wide the door of a "lily house."
"Come here, children," cried I. "Was there ever a more heavenly sight than these hosts of lilies holding up their white chalices to the flooding sunshine?"
"Or anything more delicious?" murmured Nell, bending lovingly over a group of Ascension lilies.
Further on there were ranks and ranks of tall callas, stately as sceptred queens, starry narcissus, white as snow, and jasmine bouvardias, with ivory tube-like blossoms in fragrant clusters.
Something "new, and strange, and sweet" greeted us at every step. Here it was a Deutzia, with starry cup-like blossoms; there a Spiræa, with spikes of milk-white plumes; here sprays of creamy Lantanas, and yonder clusters of tasselled Ageratum.