HORTICULTURAL REMINISCENCES. 227 



enough for innocent amusements outside of the time required for 

 garden service ; and marbles and foot-ball games and old fash- 

 ioned bat and ball were enjoyed with all the more relish for the 

 practical labor expended on the soil. 



The most lasting and permanent of all recollections are those 

 associated with the land. They strengthen with increase of years, 

 and bring back to old age bright visions of the native hearth- 

 stone. Manhood struggles through mechanical and commercial 

 pursuits, that it may spend its decUning years upon the hill-sides 

 and meadows where cluster the memories of youth. The boy who 

 goes out from the farm to mechanical and commercial industries 

 looks back perhaps indifferently in the prime of his manhood to 

 the long days of his early toil on the land ; but his love of the 

 excitements of trade abates, as age advances and the years bring 

 gray hairs and baldness ; and as, in the near future, he sees him- 

 self again owning the homestead farm and surrounded on his 

 broad acres by his sons and grandsons. 



Say what we will, the ideals of life are infinitely more to us than 

 the realities. The ideals have made civilization. The enthusiasts 

 who have been looked upon with pity have laid the foundations 

 upon which all that is most useful in natural product and 

 artificial life has been created. By the ideal we make possible the 

 seemingly impossible ; or rather it is the ideal which gives birth 

 and existence to the real. The ideal develops manhood a thou- 

 sand fold faster than the cold practical — and this same practical, 

 however familiar and unimpressive now, was once itself an ideal. 



The dreamers have made the flowers, whose odors and beauties 

 prove the poverty of language when we attempt to put in words 

 the ecstacy they bring ; they have made the fruits, whose delicious 

 juices invigorate humanity, and lead, through the means of the 

 physical, the soul and mind high up in the spiritual and intellec- 

 tual spheres ; they have made the vegetables, which have multi- 

 plied in numbers and excellence of variet}' until the garden has 

 become the best source of health and vigor. 



No man sets his aim so high as the one who takes for his study 

 the soil and its creations. To deal with natural law understand- 

 ingly requires far closer stud}^ than to comprehend the mere police 

 regulations which society and communities of men have woven 

 into statute law. 



Natural law is infinite. A few of its results in hybridization 



