For anyone with a small stove I can thoroughly advise growing some of the more easily cultivated Orchids. For many years all Orchids seemed to me to smell of money, and to represent great expenditure; but this is not the case at all. They only want the treatment suited to them, and the same care and attention required by other plants that are grown in heat. Cypripediums come in most usefully at this time of year; they last well in water, and continue to flower at times all through the winter. There are endless varieties of them to be bought, and some of the least expensive plants are often as good as the costly ones; it is only the new varieties that are dear. Some that I have -green, spotted with brown, and with clear white tips -are lovely. They have looked well lately on the dinner-table, arranged with little branches of a shrubby Veronica, called, I believe, V. speciosum. It is a plant well worth growing for the charming light green of its leaves out of doors at this time of year, when fresh green is so rare. Unlike most of the shrubby Veronicas, it lasts well in water. It has a long white flower in July, which is not especially pretty. We also grow very successfully Dendrobium nobile, Oncidium sphacelatum, and several other Orchids that flower in the early part of the year.

To-day there have come up from the country-not from my own home, which is too dry, but from near Salisbury-some branches cut from an old Thorn or Apple tree, and covered with long hoary-grey moss. I have put them into an old ginger-jar without water, and in this way they will last through the winter. They stand now against a red wall, where they look exceedingly well.