INTRODUCTION 1 3 



them quite — if you please — according to orthodox rules. 

 Where they had learned this still remains a mystery. 



All through the long summer's heat this little band raked 

 and watered and weeded, in fact fairly brooded over the rows 

 of potato plants. These in time actually looked quite flour- 

 ishing, and were extravagantly admired by many child visitors. 

 But, sad to say, the season ended before they had produced 

 a single potato large enough to cook. 



Here the tale might be expected to end. But no, the boys 

 were not \'anquished by what an ordinary critic would have 

 called a wasted summer. The following spring found them 

 once more at their neighbor's door, with even more earnest 

 pleadings, if possible, than before. In the meantime, how- 

 ever, fresh difficulties had arisen in the shape of a new land- 

 lord who did not want to bother about boys. And so the lads 

 went their ways. Whatever the incident had meant to them, 

 it was not without its value to her, and she would not dis- 

 miss it without inquiring into it carefully. The movement, 

 it seems, had owed its impulse and its execution chiefly to 

 one boy, a born organizer. Gardening had somehow struck 

 his fancy ; he saw in it the very magnet with which to attract 

 his " gang." Through his gift of leadership this arduous 

 work had prospered, and of course the reason that it did not 

 strike the children as a failure was that potatoes was only 

 the opportunity for association, not the underlying purpose. 



No one who understood children could help sympathizing 

 with the latent possibilities of such a situation. Tempting 

 fields for mischief lay all about them — beckoned to them, 

 in fact, from eveiy alleyway. Yet they had chosen this area, 

 which, though tiny, in its possibilities was vast. Far more 

 remarkable than potatoes, there had flourished here a faith 

 in cause and comrades which, in no mere figurative sense, 

 could remove mountains. Faith like this forms the basis of 



