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EASTER LILIES AND GIRLS

Reginging Styles Favor the Curves of the Easter Flower.

Sonic Odd Designs in Spring Gowns for the Church Festival.

Bonnets, Hair, Skirts, Sleeves and Capes Carr All Be Apadpted to the Lily Shape.

The Lily girl will bloom today. Easter Sunday is the fit day of all the year in which to consider the lillies. All flowers in some oriental languages are classed under the term lillum a name of ancient and uncertain origin. The botanist has classified fifty species of the lily family all confined to the northen hemispher in thinking of speaking of lilies we always mean the snowy bell-like flower with its breast of gold, but there are fed purple and blue lillies. Japanese lillies with their splendid wealth of coloring white dotted with purple of coloring white dotted with purple and striped with gold, white and rose-colored and the familiar Chinese tiger lily, with its bronze flecked petals.

The lily of the Old Testament is conjectured to have been red in coloring, and the red anemone with which all the fields of Gallilee are dotted, is likley to have suggested the figure, perfect in its sublimity, which Christ used in glorifying the lillies of the field.

But the glistening white lily waas one of the commonest garden flwoers of antiquity, appearing with the rose and the violet from Homer down to the sweet poet who sings.

Take a lily in thy hand.
Gates of the brass cannot withstand
One touch of that magic wand.

As the flower of spotless purity it was always contrasted with the blood red rose of Aphrodite. In the middle ages the lily was taken as the symnbol of heavenly purity, and the painters have crowned their Madonnas with the golden=hearted flowers and placed the spray of tender gleed, blossoming and budding in the head of the angel that with raiment white as snow declareth the resurrection of Christ"

It is doubtful if there be any record in the New Testament of Christ's having ever made public refernce to any other flower save the lily and this makes the blossom peculiarly fit to be the emblem of the Eastertide.

WHERE THE LILIES COME FROM

Our Easter flower is an alien coming from Bermude, Holland and Japan ninety per cent come from Bermuda, the extra freight preventing other countries from competing with the island, and for another important reason, that the Bermuda lily is the most beautiful and is easier to bring inot bloom at Easter. The bulbs to the number of 8,000,000 are annually imported in July or August.

The lily growers separate the bulb into parts, and plant each part. The new bulbs are not exported the first year, but are the second. It takes four years to produce the great bulbs four inches in diameter, from which spring the tall stalk, crowned with many blossoms.

The grower has boards with four holes of different sizes, and the bulbs are sorted by passing them through these holes. One sees in Bermuda lily fields covered with plants from a few inches to two or three feet. The bulbs from the tall ones are sent to the United States. The florissts then pot them and keep them in green houses where by a system of clipping they are forced to bloom just at Easter.

A GREAT INDUSTRY.