garden when, in the order of divine nursing, it was ready to receive them, although now it seemed so drear and parched. Suddenly I heard the rapid tread of youthful feet behind me, and, turning around, I was greeted by one of my boys with a voice full of heartiness, with eyes dancing with enthusiasm, as he exclaimed, "Oh, Mr. Jones, mamma thinks her nightblooming cereus is going to blossom to-night. Don't you want to come to see it?" "Certainly," I said; "when it is dark enough I'll come around." The spirit of the boy had cured me of whatever attack of moral dyspepsia I was suffering from. I had never seen this mystic plant in bloom, and I anticipated a large measure of joy and surprise. In due time I presented myself to this most exquisite and most modest of the floral sisterhood. To those of you who have never looked upon the noble blossom, the beauty is indescribable; to those of you who have, description is unnecessary.

I was prepared to compliment, but I stood in its presence silent. A fragrance filled the room like some incense offered a vestal virgin of ancient day. The long, graceful petals of matchless white formed a deep cup such as, in the days of fantastic imagination, wood-nymphs might have used for drinking-cups, or a fairy might have been proud to hold her levee under its canopy. To modern imagination, curbed by our more scientific tendencies, it more probably would suggest a beautiful silver bell with a golden clapper, all the hardness and coldness of the silver having been refined out of it, leaving only the whiteness and the purity, with an elasticity greater than that of wax. The golden hammer had disintegrated into a sheaf of delicate fibres, a skein of silken threads, with the color of gold so refined that there was but the ghost of it left, just the spirit of the yellow in the marvellous stamens.

The plant itself seemed big with beauty. It was tremulous with an inner glory, of which this one blossom was symptomatic. I went again the next night, and in place of the one fair maiden of the night before, which had vanished with the night, there hung seven regal sisters upon the vine-like arms

of the plant, each as beautiful as the first, magnificent specimens of a magnificent flower. A beautiful alarm had gone. forth; the neighborhood had been summoned as if to a celestial council. Men and women came in continual streams. They came in idle curiosity, but they stayed to offer their tribute of praise at a shrine whereon a hidden potency was disclosing itself in startling radiance. The little town was aroused by a passing glory. Men hurried from their counting and forgot their figures. Women dropped their baking and their sewing. They approached with a merry flippancy in their voices, but their voices were suddenly subdued. They were soon touched with that awe which reaches the minor keys in the human throat, which keys alone are competent to express holier moods of the soul.

I've stood in the presence of beautiful brides, draped in spotless robes, ready for nuptial vows, and have noted how such loveliness awes into silence an hilarious company; but never have I witnessed a company more impressed with the thought that silence was a more intelligible language than speech, as in this case, where nature had hung her explosive beauty upon the ungainly stem of a cactus. Romping girls and rollicking boys tiptoed their way to the flowers, peered into their depths, inhaled their fragrance, reluctantly turned away, turned again to take a last look as friends take leave of dear ones before tenderly consigning the casket, as perishable and more beautiful than this, to that narrow house of clay that is evermore to be overarched by so large a dome of remembrance.

I have never escaped from the fair visitation of that night. It has followed me into the glare of the sunlight, filled with cares and hurries. It has often blinded me to the obtrusive realities of the heedless world. Like the outlines of a beautiful dream, it has often haunted my thought-chambers. It has captured my study-hours, directed my reading, and often filled my soul with its fragrant aroma. It awakened in my brain such fertile hints and half-thoughts that I did not dare

be rude with them. I am thus compelled to confess with the Psalmist, "O Lord, thou hast visited me in the night." It is under such an influence that I venture to bring to you such lessons and helps as I may out of the lessons and helps that the flower has given to me.

We do not have to go far before we realize that the cacti are brave pioneers in the vegetable world. They are called upon to face scorching droughts above, barren sand or naked rock below. With one or two exceptions they are plants without leaves. Leaves would be all too prodigal of the scant moisture which they receive only in occasional rains, and which they must conserve through long seasons of drought; hence the bark must carry on the work of assimilation and elaboration, which in the more favored plants leaves are given to do. Even the bark is scarcely more than a leathery rind, furnished with here and there a pore, lest the blistering sun pump the fountains of life too rapidly and the plant choke to death. In the rainy season this plant exerts all its clumsy energy, fills its great canteens with water, makes a hurried push towards maturity, and in one great spasm of creative energy puts forth its flower of transcendent beauty, ripens its fruit for humble service, and then settles back to its patient, hard life, a naked child in a desert waste. The cacti are the camels of the vegetable world, content to live where all the other plants refuse to stay, and they are permitted to render a service to man not unlike that of the camel. Many varieties of this family yield a wholesome fruit, which forms no small part of the subsistence of the humanity that ventures to tarry for awhile in their midst. The wild ass has learned to carefully remove from his hoof the prickly melon, and then with a decisive stroke lays open the fountain for his refreshment. The Spaniard at home, taking the hint from his tropical brethren in America, has transplanted certain varieties, which he cultivates into perpetual and impassable fences. The Indians of Camana make oars and door-posts out of the woody stems. Humboldt thinks this wood can successfully

resist centuries of weather, so compact and fibreless is the tissue. Indeed, the longevity of the cactus in its native home' approaches deathlessness. When the English and French established their boundaries in the islands of the West Indies, they planted three rows of cacti along the line. These living posts, vegetable Terms, may last as long as the French and English have rival interests. The military engineers of South America have planted their approaches to the fortifications thick with cacti. These, with the crocodiles they keep in the moats around their earthworks, insure better protection from their stealthy foe than cutlasses or cannon. A diviner way of saving life is found by a company in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts. It imports the matchless blossoms of the Cereus grandiflorus, the veritable night-blooming cereus, for the purpose of manufacturing therefrom a medicine for heartdisease.

One more striking service does this humble plant render to man. The artist who touches with carmine his sunset glow and the maiden who delights in the brighter-red ribbon upon her hat are indebted to the most humble cactus. The debt passes through a long chain of agents, each link of which is obscure. On the Opuntia Cochinifera grows the little cochineal insect. Extensive gardens, numbering some fifty thousand plants, are cultivated in Mexico, New Granada, and the Canary Islands, for the purpose of rearing these little animals, seventy thousand of which are sacrificed in order to produce one pound of commercial cochineal. England alone imports two thousand tons annually at the rate of four hundred pounds per ton. This makes four million dollars' worth which England alone takes from the breast of the ugly-looking little plant. The little animal is gathered by delicate brushes made of squirrel-tails, and is brought to his death by delicate torture, so that the coloring-material may reach its maximum value. Should we not dip our pens into carmine ink a little more reverently in the face of these facts, when we realize how expensive are the pigments of life? Will we not

lay them a little more carefully upon the canvas of our earthly existence ?

By such subtle yet strong chains does God bind us to the farthest and weakest things. Through the linked chain of omnipotence does the spirit of the universe connect the ink which flows from your pens with the scorching sides of the Andes.

"All service ranks alike with God;

To him there is no great nor small."

Are we not now ready to find lessons for the development of which I have tried to hint at in these most suggestive facts?

We

First, then, our night-blooming cereus teaches us that beauty is a fundamental and essential principle in the universe. must confess that closely coiled at the centre of things there lies a force that shapeth itself in beauty. It is that which covers the naked rocks of our northern hills with lichens and moss, cushions the ragged sides of the Andes with cacti pads, and carpets the sandy plains of the West with varieties of the same family. On the crisp and crackling lava-beds of Sicily they have planted the opuntia, and there these pioneers of the floral kingdom, John the Baptists of the Gospel of Beauty, are fastening their fingers among those cinders, and in Nature's good time they will help lay the soil out of which the palm and the lily will spring. From mountain-tops to sluggish swamps, by rudest hut as in royal garden, Nature sends her flowers. Indeed, as if afraid to trust her realms anywhere without these guardian angels of beauty, she creates mimic flowers on crusted snow, outlines roses and dahlias on sheeted ice, traces ferns upon frosted glass. In the realms of perpetual darkness, in the deepest labyrinths of the Mammoth Cave, she has carved roses and caused stone lilies to bloom. Thus it is that God visits us in the night, and through his night-blooming cereus reminds us of that universal spirit that has adorned with beauty every age, touched with glory