LITTLE GARDENS 



down and go to seed, and of cosmos that springs 

 to a six-foot measure in a couple of nights and 

 flaunts around the premises in clouds of pink and 

 red and white — they realize that the man who 

 receives these eternal blazons will brood over 

 them, in a state of increasing helplessness, falling 

 deeper and deeper into the toils of his own and 

 the seedsmen's imagination as he does so, until, 

 wholly victim, he opens his desk and composes a 

 check, in return for which he receives certain 

 envelopes of seed, and sundry unpromising frag- 

 ments of root or cuttings and various withered 

 bulbs, all of which may, yet now and then, do 

 not, explode into floral fireworks a few weeks 

 later. Commercialism is a dreadful thing, and 

 when flowers get into it they do not appear to 

 exercise any more restraint on the moral habits 

 of their growers than if they were pig-iron, or 

 sausages. 



Yet, do not suppose that the seedsman is a 

 natural enemy of small gardeners. Far from it. 

 Some of the things I have bought from him 

 were better than he advertised, especially as 

 they acquainted me with the pleasures of hope. 

 For, after all, it is not the product in which we 

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