A LITTLE FLOWER GARDEN 7 



escape the heart-song his sorry garden is try- 

 ing to sing to him — sorry garden, for a garden 

 cannot make itself — ^he cannot escape it if he 

 has a soul, and I think he has. When I go 

 down his street and look over his fence at the 

 growing things beyond, for all the world a 

 garden of prim precision and joylessness, I 

 say to myself, "That is Noman's garden," and 

 I pass on with a sigh, I tried to talk to him 

 once about gardens — about mine. It was in 

 the early Spring, and I hoped to learn how 

 he had managed to make his Larkspurs taller 

 than mine, though his were not so blue. Alas ! 

 Enough chemicals to have estabhshed a phar- 

 macy, and a grim determination that his gar- 

 den would look down upon mine, — that was 

 all I got out of him; he had never heard of 

 Omar Khayyam, of Francis Thompson, and 

 would have lost faith in Francis Bacon had he 

 known the great philosopher had "wasted" his 

 time in discoursing "Of Gardens." For my 

 own part, I can dismiss the matter of Noman's 

 garden from my mind as though he were a pur- 

 veyor of dried herbs, being, nevertheless, char- 

 itable enough to wish him well. 



