HOW IT BEGAN. 3 



fact when you see it. Therefore, it happens that in 

 presenting this dish of greens I may add sundry facts 

 for dressing, the same facts being duly dug up in the 

 same handkerchief garden. Persons of a romantic and 

 expansive frame of mind have written about gardens 

 without regard to the facts growing therein. One 

 particularly aggravating person even wrote a tearful 

 account of one sad summer in a garden, and the world 

 has been delighted to read it many times over. My 

 handkerchief garden is on a plane of more solemn im- 

 port, and its great moral lessons are not addressed to 

 persons of a light and sportive nature. They appeal 

 rather to those finer instincts of the heart that cluster 

 round the dinner table and the green-grocer's bill. 



A pinch of seed in a paper bag is about as useless a 

 thing as you can find. The seed must be joined to 

 three great facts in nature — heat, moisture and light, 

 if new wealth is to reward our labors. Lettuce seed 

 will sprout in a temperature ranging from 60" to 70° by 

 day, and not less than 40° by night.* Our room had 

 a west window and was warmed by a small stove. 

 Here were the elements of horticultural success. 

 There was no gas in the room. This is most import- 

 ant — for in my experience it is difficult, almost im- 

 possible, to raise plants of any kind where gas is 

 burned. A single gas-jet will spoil the air as fast as 

 six men. Plants must have pure air, and as they can 

 not go out for a walk every time they have a head- 

 ache, they give up in despair in a room where a gas- 

 lamp has ruined the air for breathing purposes. The 

 moral of all this is just here; if plants will not thrive 

 in bad air, how can we ? We do not. There is, it is 

 true, no authenticated record of a death by reason of a 

 gas-light, yet it is also true that we are hurt in greater 



* All temperature records here are by Fahrenheit's scale. 



