As We Were Saying | Page 5

scissors out of tissue-paper, but capable of
taking infinite varieties of color, and growing as big as a curtain tassel,
that literally captures the world, and spreads all over the globe, like the
Canada thistle. The florists have no eye for anything else, and the
biggest floral prizes are awarded for the production of its eccentricities.

Is the rage for this flower typical of this fast and flaring age?
The Drawer is not an enemy to the chrysanthemum, nor to the
sunflower, nor to any other gorgeous production of nature. But it has an
old- fashioned love for the modest and unobtrusive virtues, and an
abiding faith that they will win over the strained and strident displays
of life. There is the violet: all efforts of cultivation fail to make it as big
as the peony, and it would be no more dear to the heart if it were
quadrupled in size. We do, indeed, know that satisfying beauty and
refinement are apt to escape us when we strive too much and force
nature into extraordinary display, and we know how difficult it is to get
mere bigness and show without vulgarity. Cultivation has its limits.
After we have produced it, we find that the biggest rose even is not the
most precious; and lovely as woman is, we instinctively in our
admiration put a limit to her size. There being, then, certain laws that
ultimately fetch us all up standing, so to speak, it does seem probable
that the chrysanthemum rage will end in a gorgeous sunset of its
splendor; that fashion will tire of it, and that the rose, with its secret
heart of love; the rose, with its exquisite form; the rose, with its
capacity of shyly and reluctantly unfolding its beauty; the rose, with
that odor--of the first garden exhaled and yet kept down through all the
ages of sin --will become again the fashion, and be more passionately
admired for its temporary banishment. Perhaps the poet will then come
back again and sing. What poet could now sing of the "awful
chrysanthemum of dawn"?

THE RED BONNET
The Drawer has no wish to make Lent easier for anybody, or rather to
diminish the benefit of the penitential season. But in this period of
human anxiety and repentance it must be said that not enough account
is made of the moral responsibility of Things. The doctrine is sound;
the only difficulty is in applying it. It can, however, be illustrated by a
little story, which is here confided to the reader in the same trust in
which it was received. There was once a lady, sober in mind and sedate
in manner, whose plain dress exactly represented her desire to be
inconspicuous, to do good, to improve every day of her life in actions
that should benefit her kind. She was a serious person, inclined to
improving conversation, to the reading of bound books that cost at least

a dollar and a half (fifteen cents of which she gladly contributed to the
author), and she had a distaste for the gay society which was mainly a
flutter of ribbons and talk and pretty faces; and when she meditated, as
she did in her spare moments, her heart was sore over the frivolity of
life and the emptiness of fashion. She longed to make the world better,
and without any priggishness she set it an example of simplicity and
sobriety, of cheerful acquiescence in plainness and inconspicuousness.
One day--it was in the autumn--this lady had occasion to buy a new hat.
From a great number offered to her she selected a red one with a dull
red plume. It did not agree with the rest of her apparel; it did not fit her
apparent character. What impulse led to this selection she could not
explain. She was not tired of being good, but something in the
jauntiness of the hat and the color pleased her. If it were a temptation,
she did not intend to yield to it, but she thought she would take the hat
home and try it. Perhaps her nature felt the need of a little warmth. The
hat pleased her still more when she got it home and put it on and
surveyed herself in the mirror. Indeed, there was a new expression in
her face that corresponded to the hat. She put it off and looked at it.
There was something almost humanly winning and temptatious in it. In
short, she kept it, and when she wore it abroad she was not conscious of
its incongruity to herself or to her dress, but of the incongruity of the
rest of her apparel to the hat, which seemed to have a sort of
intelligence of its own, at least a power of changing and