14 ^Success *&ith Small Fruits. 



.:.'..- 

 Many think of the soil only in connection with the sad words of 



the burial service "Earth to earth, ashes to ashes." Let us, while we 

 may, gain more cheerful associations with our kindred dust. For a time it 

 can be earth to strawberry blossoms, ashes to bright red berries, and their 

 color will get into our cheeks and their rich subacid juices into our insipid 

 lives, constituting a mental, moral and physical alterative that will so 

 change us that we shall believe in evolution and imagine ourselves fit for 

 a higher state of existence. One may delve in the earth so long as to lose 

 all dread at the thought of sleeping in it at last, and the luscious fruits and 

 bright-hued flowers that come out of it, in a way no one can find out, may 

 teach our own resurrection more effectually than do the learned theologians. 



We naturally feel that some good saints in the flesh, even though they 

 are " pillars of the church," need more than a " sea-change " before they 

 can become proper citizens of " Jerusalem the Golden," but having com- 

 pared a raspberry bush, bending gracefully under its delicious burden, with 

 the insignificant seed from which it grew, we are ready to .believe in all 

 possibilities of good. Thus we may gather more than berries from our 

 fruit-gardens. Nature hangs thoughts and suggestions on every spray, and 

 blackberry bushes give many an impressive scratch to teach us that good 

 and evil are very near together in this world, and that we must be careful 

 while seeking the one, to avoid the other. In every field of life those who 

 seek the fruit too rashly are almost sure to have a thorny experience, 

 and to learn that prickings are provided for those who have no consciences. 



He who sees in the world around him only what strikes the eye lives in 

 a poor, half-furnished house ; he who obtains from his garden only what he 

 can eat gathers but a meager crop. If I find something besides berries on 

 my vines, I shall pick it if so inclined. The scientific treatise, or precise 

 manual, may break up the well-rooted friendship of plants, and compel 

 them to take leave of each other, after the arbitrary fashion of methodical 

 minds, but I must talk about them very much as nature has taught me, 

 since, in respect to out-of-door life, my education was acquired almost 

 wholly in the old-fashioned way at the venerable "dame's school." 

 Nay more, I claim that I have warrant to gather from my horticultural 

 texts more than can be sent to the dining-table or commission merchant. 

 Such a matter-of-fact plant as the currant makes some attempt to embroider 

 its humble life with ornament, and in April the bees will prove to you that 

 honey may be gathered even from a gooseberry bush. Indeed, goose- 

 berries are like some ladies that we all know. In their young and blos- 

 soming days they are sweet and pink-hued, and then they grow acid, pale, 

 and hard, but in the ripening experience of later life they become sweet 



