112 DUTCH BULBS AND GARDENS 



dear old man who usually smokes at meals and 

 very often in bed, to the danger of his bed- 

 curtains ; I do not think that he, even if cruel fate 

 compelled him to refrain himself, could find it 

 in his heart to forbid his workmen the well-loved 

 pipe ; certainly they all smoke everywhere in his 

 barns, but, so far as I have heard, he has never 

 suffered loss by fire. 



Mice can give much trouble to bulb growers ; 

 they are very partial to some kinds of bulbs ; they 

 eat them in the ground unless they are driven out 

 by deep digging and laying the earth open to 

 the frost beforehand. In the barns they naturally 

 assume that the grower has kindly put up a good 

 store for them. But by traps and cats and poison 

 and wonderful Dutch orderliness they are kept 

 under. In a bulb barn at night one hears few of 

 the mysterious rustlings and patterings that make 

 an English barn suggestive of hid but active life. 



There is one other thing to be guarded against 

 in some few barns, that is frost. Not in the 

 generality, of course, the ones where are accumu- 

 lated the ordinary bulbs of the trade ; but in the 

 ones where there are stored things for spring 

 planting, such as gladioli, begonias, hemerocallis, 

 dahlias, and other and choicer bulbs and tubers, 



