An Embellishment of Life

"Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers.  All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance.  But this rose is an extra.  Its smell and its colour are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it.  It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers"


From "The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure of the Naval Treaty"  by Arthur Conan Doyle (1859 - 1930)