SUMMER MEETING. 23 



When your mind is made up on these points, it will not take long, 

 if you have tact, to convince "the dearest man in the world" that he 

 needs out-door exercise, and needs it to the extent of several dozen 

 wheel-barrow loads of garden soil, leaf-mold and earth from the stable 

 yard. He will not object nor complain of tired back or aching shoul- 

 ders. Ob, no. The wily man looks into the future, and sees the 

 crumbling of all your plans, the end of all your rose-colored hopes* 

 and smiling calmly to himself, he awaits the time that is surely coming 

 when his "I thought as much" will repay him for all this labor. 



Now your beds are ready, and you, in the meantime, have seen in 

 the magazines glowing advertisements of plants whose species must 

 have come down direct from Eden, unharmed by the "thorns also and 

 thistles," which Adam was told should forever curse the ground, and 

 unchanged by the flight of 6000 years. So perfect are they, so gor- 

 geous, that you think of their beauty by day, and your dreams at night 

 are tilled with their loveliness and fragrance. All this splendor is 

 offered you for a mere song. Sixteen or twenty superb plants for a 

 dollar. Your housewifely economy and American gullibility get the 

 better of your common-sense. 



Of course, you know you can get nice plants at your own green- 

 house, but then, you have seen them, and they do not compare with 

 those wonders of the floral catalogues. So you send several dollars 

 to these generous advertisers, and when you have waited till you have 

 almost forgotten you ever made the order, and your beds, once so soft 

 and loamy, are all packed down, except in spots where the aforesaid 

 chickens have scattered the loose dirt for yards around over your sod, 

 you get, through the mail, a package slightly larger than a match-box, 

 containing your sixty, eighty or one hundred magnificent plants. 



With a sold-out feeling you open the box, and by the aid of a 

 microscope you might discover faint signs of life in some of the dry- 

 looking sticks. Hope revives a little ; your determination is undaunted ; 

 you put out these sorry specimens of plant-life and shade them from 

 the sun, which this time of waiting has brought round to its June in- 

 tensity of heat. You go to bed that night thinking that flower-garden- 

 ing is not without its discouragements after all. 



The next week or two you spend in coaxing and anxiously watch- 

 ing, till you are rewarded by the appearance of one, two, three, or 

 perhaps a half-dozen tiny green leaves. Now it is that your chickens 

 begin their part of the work by carefully picking off every leaf, though 

 the yard is full of other verdure from which a thousand leaves would 

 not be missed. 



