156 Hardy Plants for Cottage Gardens 
her steamed complexion, heightened by rouge and cosmetics, 
adopts a restricted diet, massage and Delsarte to preserve her 
fast-waning beauty. When locks grow thin, they can at least 
be parted neatly; and a careful removal of faded and dead 
growths keeps a September garden trim and neat. 
One more reason for my garden, if any further be needed, 
is that it affords the most delightful and wholesome exercise 
imaginable. True, one is not beautiful in big, stout boots, in 
short skirt and too often collarless waist. Freckles and sun- 
burn and roughened hands are not the usual weapons of co- 
quetry. What matter these disqualifications when you have 
plotted a whole week for a free day in the garden? I have 
risen at half past five o’clock to get a good start; I have worked 
in the hot sun until I was forced to retreat for a few minutes 
under a tree to cool off; I have paused from sheer fatigue mid- 
way to the garden with a wheelbarrow of stones for a wall toa 
new terrace, and questioned if that present moment yielded 
the pure joy I had been anticipating for a whole week. I have 
rested shovel in hand while digging into a bank, to wipe my 
weeping brow just as a street laborer does, and recovering 
breath, asked myself why I was eager to do such work? To 
none of my questions have I ever found an answer, save that 
it was for the joy of the doing, and for the results that justify 
the hard work. Without these preparatory labors the gar- 
den could not have existed. From the very start I decided 
that I should have nothing done that I could not do myself; 
this was to be my one plaything, devised for my individual 
pleasure and exercise, and when it became too ambitious for 
my hands to tend, I’d give it up. 
All I know of these specially appointed days is that they 
are too short, too few; the hours do not exist. I have clumped 
into the house at six at night—having taken only a reluctant 
period of rest at noon during a hasty dinner—so tired and 
