A lovely flower came to us last week from the back yard of a home in the city. It was a white hyacinth, large and full, white as the driven snow, and sweetly perfumed. And it came not from the florist's hothouse, nor from the fine plot at the front of a good home, but from the little yard at the rear. What a thing of beauty and fragrance to spring up in this homely place, common, soiled and trampled! It is a happy thought, not uncommon nowadays, to make the back yard, not often seen by other's eyes, a place of beauty and sweetness, turning the common and the obscure into a source of pleasure and all that is wholesome and inspiring.
One may do well to look after the back yard of his own life. He has sometimes a front that all men see and admire. Toward his friends and neighbors he is carful to make a fair exhibition of good morals and courteous manner. He maintains a front with which no fault can be found. But can the rear, the small and commonplace, the every-day and out-of-sight part of character and conduct, bear the same careful inspection? Are there any fair and fragrant flowers that spring up where no man ever looks, and only God's eye can see?
