114 Hardy Plants for Cottage Gardens 
indiscretion, they are an easy prey to disease. Else why 
should a larkspur of healthy parentage suddenly fall ill with 
a bilious attack of blight? Why should certain roses and the 
Michaelmas daisy suddenly break out with an eruption of 
mildew, as disfiguring a disease as smallpox? Why should 
robust hollyhocks fall like an apoplectic patient under the 
rust? Why should white larkspurs develop a cancerous 
condition in their young crowns, which learned practitioners 
call “the rot”? I advise an abstemious diet for the young; 
for one has no right to be a promoter of disease and become 
a peril to society. 
The prototype of the social climber is the vine that clutches 
at anything higher than itself for a support, and uses every- 
thing but as a stepping-stone to further its advancement in 
the world. Doubtless we have all come the way of the vine 
through our remote past, for I have seen several varieties of 
forest trees, lying on the ground, denuded of their bark, and 
the twining propensities had not yet been outlived, for the 
grain of the fiber of the trunk still distinctly showed the 
spiral tendency. We are further advanced from the tree 
than the tree is from the vine, and it is high time that the race 
left this ignoble heritage of the past behind. Any one who 
has seen a vine strangle the life that helps it to mount higher, 
and then cut its acquaintance to gain another foothold, loyal 
to none, hurtful to all in its wolfish aggressions, must have 
an intense scorn for the social climber, who uses the same 
cruel methods, destroying a friend who has once served; 
whose only passion is to push a claim of rapacious arrogance 
at any cost. 
Compared with this type I love the one I am about to 
describe—beggars. I discover beggary running far back of 
human annals; for in the weeds of the garden I see the fore- 
shadowing of the outstretched palm, the avoidance of re- 
