THE AMATEUR GARDEN 



leisure, madame, entrez!" In New Orleans 

 the conductors do not cry "Step lively ! " Right 

 or wrong, the cars there are not absolutely 

 democratic. Gentility really enjoys in them a 

 certain right to be treated gently. 



If democracy could know its own tjTants it 

 would know that one of them is haste — the 

 haste, the hurry of the crowd; that hurry whose 

 cracking whip makes every one a compulsory 

 sharer in it. The street-car conductor, poor lad, 

 is not to blame. The fault is ours, many of 

 us being in such a scramble to buy democracy 

 at any price that, as if we were belatedly buying 

 railway tickets, we forget to wait for our change. 



Now one of this tyrant's human forms is a 

 man a part of whose tyranny is to call himself 

 a gardener, though he knows he is not one, and 

 the symbol of whose oppression is nothing more 

 or less than that germ enemj^ of good garden- 

 ing, the lawn-mower. You, if you know the 

 gardening of our average American home al- 

 most anywhere else, would see, yourself, how 

 true this is, were you in New Orleans. But you 

 see it beautifully proved not by the presence 



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