The Last Word. 215 



sect (I believe no saint has tried them yet) is the quail. 

 Unfortunately, the extremely reasonable price of shot- 

 guns forbids the coincidence of quail and potato-patches 

 to any marked degree. These bugs, aside from afford- 

 ing a convenient employ for children that would other- 

 wise fool away their time in playing and so gaining 

 strength for the battle of life, have done a great work. 

 They introduced us to Paris green, a valuable insecticide 

 and one that is perfectly safe for us, since it is not solu- 

 ble in water and it takes as much bigger a dose to kill a 

 man as a man is bigger than a potato-bug. Another 

 arsenical preparation, London purple, does about as 

 well. And that recalls another story that I meant to put 

 in the chapter. An entomologist was traveling up the 

 Mississippi on a river steamer when his attention was 

 called to the ice cream by the admiring plaudits of his 

 fellow-passengers, who had never before beheld anything 

 so pretty. Come to find out, the chef, a true artist in his 

 line, had seen some London purple sifting out of the bags 

 in the cargo and had scraped it up to color the ice cream, 

 and here this entomologist had to go and spoil every- 

 thing by telling the people that it had arsenic in it. 



I have not thought out exactly what I was going to 

 say in the chapter on the Guerrillas of the Garden. 

 There would have been a lot of matter, and even if it had 

 not been very interesting or full of pretty pictures, I am 

 satisfied that the chapter heading would have carried it 

 off all right. People don't mind what is in a book so 

 long as it has a nice title and She gets Him. 



But though this is not the kind of a book where She 

 gets Him, in this last chapter I have managed, in spite 

 of my proneness for divagation, to do the next best thing. 

 It is not enough for the author to dispose of the fates of 

 the Hero, Heroine, and Wicked Villain. He must also 



