Some Gardeners I Have Known 157 



stiff that I could hardly move but so happy, so content, so 

 full of the events of the day that I could hardly wait till the 

 morrow to resume the work. This does not explain the fas- 

 cination; I merely know that it exists and continues unabated 

 year after year. After eight years I am still of the mind to 

 have no stone walls that I cannot lay myself and I have 

 grown as fastidious about the selection and placing of my 

 stones as a lapidary who works in mosaic I shall have no new 

 beds that I cannot prepare. At this moment I have just com- 

 pleted new extensions, a mood that takes me each autumn. 

 And what lessons have come to me through this so-called 

 drudgery! Who shall measure the impetus to horticulture 

 every amateur gives, when insuperable obstacles are sur- 

 mounted, and proof is made that a truly beautiful garden is 

 possible where conditions were supposed to be impossible ? 

 It was only through the toilsome erection of overshadowing 

 stone walls and careful digging out, refilling and fertilizing the 

 beds, that our barren dry hill-top was capable of growing any- 

 thing. Every step of this preparation was necessary to secure 

 the perfect bloom. In short the garden as it now stands is the 

 fine flowering of the varied manual effort that prepared it. I 

 sought still further to see if the analogy would hold true be- 

 yond matter, and I saw that the beautiful glimpses of truth 

 that had illumined so many of my working hours were a more 

 etherialized flower and fruit of labor; that in my intimate per- 

 sonal contact with matter I had learned that it is but a symbol 

 of spirit : matter had become the interpreter of higher things. 

 Labor was the nexus which had linked matter with spirit, and 

 through it, gradually, the many problems that confront my 

 awakening soul are becoming plain and intelligible. Now 

 when I address the elemental forms of rock and soil or the 

 more spiritualized form of plant life, or my own inner con- 

 sciousness, they all speak the same language, and proclaim 



