Word: flower
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...trudge forever forward, their rifles scraping the metaled sky. On horseback alongside them, stern, proud, aristocratic, rides their young colonel, Robert Gould Shaw. Here, just across from the gold-domed statehouse, Shaw led the North's first black regiment down Beacon Street and off to war. "The very flower of grace and chivalry," John Greenleaf Whittier wrote of Shaw's departure, "he seemed to me beautiful and awful, as an angel of God come down to lead the host of freedom to victory...
Much of the employee life outside work is spent in company social clubs, where courses are available in flower arranging and the tea ceremony. Weddings are also conducted in the social clubs; and the company helps pay the costs, including as much as $500 to rent the traditional bridal gown...
Even a genius needs practice to bring his talent into full flower. Beethoven, for example, had to get two fairly conventional symphonies under his belt before he revolutionized the form in the Eroica. Wagner, the creator of the German music-drama, required four false starts before he produced The Flying Dutchman. Giuseppe Verdi, the greatest of Italian opera composers, was no exception. Before Rigoletto, his first masterpiece, there came 16 other works, most of which have languished in obscurity for years...
...March, when the wild cactus bursts into flower throughout the Southwest, Joe Abrigo's business also blossoms. Owner of an adobe trading post and bar near the ghost town of Terlingua, Texas, Abrigo, a 43-year-old Anthony Quinn lookalike, is one of a network of entrepreneurs along the Mexican border who are engaged in the lucrative if often shadowy business of buying and selling cactus plants wholesale. In summer, when demand hits its peak, a cactus trader may ship thousands of the plants in a week. They wind up in plastic pots at supermarkets or in the homes...
...Arizona, which has the nation's toughest plant-protection law and pistol-packing lawmen to back it up, cactus rustlers make away with an estimated $500,000 to $1 million worth of plants each year. Among them: the giant saguaro (pronounced sah-vrar-o), Arizona's state flower, which grows to 50 ft. or more. The fruit of the saguaro is an important food source for practically all desert birds and is used as well by humans to make preserves and, yes, cactus wine...