26 Wisconsin State Horticultural Society. 



vegetable beds reached close to the well, and little pine 

 sticks with paper labels stuck in them, stood as headstones, 

 telling what lay buried there; but perhaps they held more 

 than the labels called for, for looking upon them Annie 

 turned, and laying her head upon her baby's neck, cried, 

 and John coming in and learning the cause, went out of 

 the house quickl3% and the door, either by accident or other- 

 wise, slammed, and as John stood at the well drinking, he 

 thought: " Hoiv can a ivoman make such a fuss over a little 

 thing." It is the sliver and not the pine wedge that makes 

 its own way under the flesh festeringly. Had it been a 

 difficult thing Annie asked of her husband, in his busy 

 seeding time, she would not have felt to measure his love 

 for her by its non-accomplishment. 



The next year John made the flower bed himself, and it 

 was not shaped like a grave; in fact, he took particular 

 pains not to raise it above the level of the ground — for so 

 Annie wished; and he covered it with the blue-eyed peri- 

 winkle Annie loved; and he planted also the sturdy pinks 

 and sweet elysium Annie raved over; and he even went 

 over to the old home among the hills, and asked Annie's 

 mother for a shoot of the white-rose by the gate — the gate 

 where the doves had cooed. And there seemed nothing too 

 sweet, and nothing too costly, to be planted upon that bed. 

 But it was not in the home garden it rested, but in God's 

 Acre; and though it was hidden in bloom, so that it lost its 

 shape in a wilderness of sweet-smelling things, it was for 

 all a grave; and as the days went by, more and more did 

 John realize what was buried there. Often in the cool of 

 evening he was to be seen working among his blooms, and 

 people passing, said: "How he loves her." But in John's 

 heart was ever an unsatisfied longing as he remembered 

 items of the past; longings for power to do something more 

 to prove the love that really existed. And he wished he 

 might make that bed as wide as all out- door, so that he 

 could pour into the past what he had withheld from it. 

 But, alas! only the interest of the debt could now be touched 

 by loving attention, for the principal had passed beyond his 

 reach. 



