H4 Hardy Plants for Cottage Gardens 



indiscretion, they are an easy prey to disease. Else why 

 should a larkspur of healthy parentage suddenly fall ill with 

 a bilious attack of blight ? Why should certain roses and the 

 Michaelmas daisy suddenly break out with an eruption of 

 mildew, as disfiguring a disease as smallpox ? Why should 

 robust hollyhocks fall like an apoplectic patient under the 

 rust? Why should white larkspurs develop a cancerous 

 condition in their young crowns, which learned practitioners 

 call "the rot"? I advise an abstemious diet for the young; 

 for one has no right to be a promoter of disease and become 

 a peril to society. 



The prototype of the social climber is the vine that clutches 

 at anything higher than itself for a support, and uses every- 

 thing but as a stepping-stone to further its advancement in 

 the world. Doubtless we have all come the way of the vine 

 through our remote past, for I have seen several varieties of 

 forest trees, lying on the ground, denuded of their bark, and 

 the twining propensities had not yet been outlived, for the 

 grain of the fiber of the trunk still distinctly showed the 

 spiral tendency. We are further advanced from the tree 

 than the tree is from the vine, and it is high time that the race 

 left this ignoble heritage of the past behind. Any one who 

 has seen a vine strangle the life that helps it to mount higher, 

 and then cut its acquaintance to gain another foothold, loyal 

 to none, hurtful to all in its wolfish aggressions, must have 

 an intense scorn for the social climber, who uses the same 

 cruel methods, destroying a friend who has once served; 

 whose only passion is to push a claim of rapacious arrogance 

 at any cost. 



Compared with this type I love the one I am about to 

 describe beggars. I discover beggary running far back of 

 human annals; for in the weeds of the garden I see the fore- 

 shadowing of the outstretched palm, the avoidance of re- 



