CHILDHOOD IN THE GARDEN 



Unluckily, many people who have children do not 

 own gardens, or at best spend but a short period of the 

 year within reach of them, and there are many thou- 

 sands of boys and girls who never know what it is to 

 work in the ground. In an effort to overcome this sad 

 condition, school gardens have been started in different 

 municipalities, particularly the Middle West Children 

 who, driven from the streets to the tenement-houses 

 and back again, had learned everything of which a 

 child should be ignorant, and who had come to act in 

 ways thoroughly appropriate to their hard and hideous 

 surroundings, were taken to these gardens and set to 

 work. 



The result was and continues to be wonderful. Like 

 Antaeus renewing his strength at each contact with the 

 earth, these children acquired a youth and joy they had 

 never known, turned, in fact, into real children, digging 

 up, as it were, out of the ground they worked, that in- 

 nocence and happiness which should have been their 

 birthright Small lads of six and eight, already marked 

 in the books of the law as "incorrigibles," toiled at 

 the new labor, becoming almost what they ought to be 

 at that age. Brown, lusty, red-cheeked under their 

 broad straw hats, looking confidently up into your face 

 as you came to see them at their planting, these " in- 

 corrigibles" strove with one another to produce the 

 largest tomatoes, the fattest peas or beans, the most 

 radiant nasturtiums or finest geraniums, pouring into 



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