6 GARDENS AND THEIR MEANING 



not really believe that lessons could produce eatables. It 

 seemed to them, no doubt, as it did to some of the teachers 

 across the way, not exactly suitable that school should stoop 

 to bother with vegetables. 



A month flew by. The red-letter day arrived, and the early 

 radishes were big enough to pull up. How superb those rad- 

 ishes looked ! The topknot of green set off the most brilliant 

 of surfaces, which, by the way, had been polished to the last 

 degree by the skillful action of a coat sleeve. "And then," 

 you ask, " did the hungry urchins fall to and eat them up?" 

 Far from it ; the garden brigade marched home that day, 

 stiff as drum majors, each man of them decorated with a 

 radish in his buttonhole. 



In the seasons that followed, hundreds of radishes and other 

 "garden sass" in great variety was harvested from school and 

 home gardens by scores of boys and girls. And during these 

 years many unexpected traits of character cropped out. But 

 this particular note in boy nature, — sentiment withstanding 

 appetite, — struck so entirely by chance, never rang out more 

 clearly than at this moment. 



With incidents of this sort in mind it seems quite pos- 

 sible, through gardens, to train children in beauty and order. 

 The kind of order, however, that children are most likely to 

 appreciate is not that expressed by trim beds and straight 

 rows, although in time they learn to care for neat and pre- 

 cise effects. 



It is the larger, the more universal evidences of order that 

 appeal to children earliest. Even little children are impressed 

 by the orderly march of the seasons and by the glimpses thev 

 get of the laws that govern living things. This is shown by 

 the very questions which they ask, in all simplicity, of us 

 grown-ups. And how we hesitate and stammer and blunder 

 at the ordeal of answering ; it looks sometimes as though we 



