THE GARDEN GROWS 



T is one of the blessed compensations that we can- 

 not recall pain once experienced, we cannot sum- 

 mon the fear that once paralyzed us. All our past 

 is insulated by varying degrees of forgetfulness. 

 Now, after eight years when I stand at the edge of my small 

 world, it is difficult to recover the alternating moods of en- 

 thusiasm and despair, the high hopes of each new day and the 

 utter fatigue and discouragement at night when I attacked 

 that stone heap. Be it remembered, however, that I had been 

 housed most of the winter by five feet of snow on the level, 

 that for months my feet had tingled to get out on the solid 

 earth, and my hands, being normal hands, longed to pull and 

 tug at something. Moreover, I was fired by a holy zeal; yet 

 if this recital is to be wholly truthful, I must state, that, having 

 gathered a crowbar, a hoe, a pickaxe, a grubbing hoe, a shovel, 

 a sickle and a potato digger into a wheelbarrow, I paused 

 with sinking heart when I wheeled my cargo to the stone heap. 

 I felt the need of more tools! 



I had decided to recover twenty-five feet square of the 

 waste, and my original idea was to dig out the bushes from 

 between the rocks, remove the larger rocks, levelling off the 

 others, and then have several cartloads of good rich soil 

 dumped on the twenty-five foot area, and mark out my beds. 

 My experience is that nothing affords such violent mental 

 gymnastics as an original idea. It never works; yet one clings 

 to it like a drowning man to a plank; and if you can conceive 

 of the drowning man trying to nail a few more planks to his 



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