ae 
A SCHOOLROOM GARDEN 
WANT you children to do a little gardening in the 
schoolroom. You will enjoy this, I am sure. 
When I was a child, I took great delight in the ex- 
periments that I am going to suggest to you; and now 
that I am grown up, I find they please me even more 
than they did years ago. 
During the past week I have been doing this sort of 
gardening; and I have become so interested in the 
plant babies which I have helped into the world, that I 
have not been at all ready to stop playing with them, 
even for the sake of sitting down to tell you about 
them. | 
To start my garden, I had first to get some seeds. 
So I put on my hat and went down to the little shop in 
the village, half of which is given up to tailor work, 
while the other half is devoted to flower raising. The 
gray-bearded florist tailor who runs this queer little 
place was greatly interested when he heard that I 
wanted the seeds so that I might tell you children 
something of their strange ways. 
“Seeds air mighty interestin’ things,” he said. “Be 
you young or be you old, there’s nothin’ sets you 
thinkin’ like a seed.”’ 
Perhaps the florist tailor had been fortunate in his 
friends; for I have known both grown-up people and 
children who year after year could see the wonder of 
seed and baby plant, of flower and fruit, without once 
' stopping to say, ‘“‘ What brings about these changes ?”’ 
