My Ambition Grows 29 



of rocks, soil and weeds; and as a guarantee that this is a real, 

 and not a fancy sketch, the lady's hand, that makes but a 

 pleasant mockery of toil, is pictured gently extended, clothed 

 to the elbow with her stout leathern gauntlet as I recall 

 mine, they were mostly either in the barn or sunning them- 

 selves on a distant rock and in her hand is something that 

 looks like a composite growth of 

 all the garden, thus proving that 

 feminine labor lightly pursued 

 is productive. And the Lady's 

 wheelbarrow, duly portrayed on ( 

 the next page, is the triggest, nat- 

 tiest little toy ever offered for sale. 

 Then the author tells you the 

 angle at which to thrust in your spade, how to use your 

 strength, how to raise the earth on the spade all of 

 which she says "may be done with ease." She evidently 

 measures the human chain by its weakest link, and after 

 saying that "so few ladies are strong enough to throw 

 earth from a heap," she tells how the feeble can make a 

 profitable compromise, and achieve the same results by a 

 strategic use of her tools. I do not know what would have 

 happened if I had used these dainty super-refined methods. 

 It took brawn and pluck and plenty of it to prepare my land. 

 In vain do I scan my authority for some hints regarding how a 

 lady should act when she strikes among the et ceteras a rock 

 several feet across, or finds her garden line escaping from the 

 "soil under long cultivation" and making straight for a slope 

 that has not been tilled since the nebular period of our globe. 

 What sort of a compromise shall she make with her shovel so 

 that the increasing pile of earth, dug out of an ever rising and 

 extending bank, shall deposit itself on the further side of a ter- 

 race wall; and is the lady's wall to be made by sundry stones 



