CROPS AND PROFITS 



With such simple and orderly arrangement, 

 involving no excessive labor, I think every 

 farmer and country-liver may take pleasure in 

 his garden as an object of beauty ;— making of 

 it a little farm in miniature, with its coppices 

 of dwarf-trees, its hedge-rows of currants and 

 gooseberries, and its meadows of strawberries 

 and thyme. From the very day on which, in 

 spring, he sees the first, faint, upheaving, 

 tufted lines of green from his Dan-O'Rourkes, 

 to the day when the dangling Limas, and 

 sprawling, bloody tomatoes are smitten by the 

 frost, it offers a field of constant progress, and 

 of successive triumphs. Line by line, and 

 company by company, the army of green things 

 take position; the little flowery banners are 

 flung to the wind ; and lo ! presently every sol- 

 dier of them all— plundering only the earth 

 and the sunshine— is loaded with booty. 



THE LESSER FRUITS 



From the time when I read of Mistress Doctor 

 Primrose's gooseberry wine, which the Doctor 

 celebrates in his charming autobiography, I 

 have entertained a kindly regard for that fruit. 

 But my efforts to grow it successfully have 

 been sadly baffled. The English climate alone, 



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