Some Gardeners I Have Known 157 
stiff that I could hardly move—but so happy, so content, so 
full of the events of the day that I could hardly wait till the 
morrow to resume the work. This does not explain the fas- 
cination; I merely know that it exists and continues unabated 
year after year. After eight years I am still of the mind to 
have no stone walls that I cannot lay myself—and I have 
grown as fastidious about the selection and placing of my 
stones as a lapidary who works in mosaic—I shall have no new 
beds that I cannot prepare. At this moment I have just com- 
pleted new extensions, a mood that takes me each autumn. 
And what lessons have come to me through this so-called 
drudgery! Who shall measure the impetus to horticulture 
every amateur gives, when insuperable obstacles are sur- 
mounted, and proof is made that a truly beautiful garden is 
possible where conditions were supposed to be impossible? 
It was only through the toilsome erection of overshadowing 
stone walls and careful digging out, refilling and fertilizing the 
beds, that our barren dry hill-top was capable of growing any- 
thing. Every step of this preparation was necessary to secure 
the perfect bloom. In short the garden as it now stands is the 
fine flowering of the varied manual effort that prepared it. I 
sought still further to see if the analogy would hold true be- 
yond matter, and I saw that the beautiful glimpses of truth 
that had illumined so many of my working hours were a more 
etherialized flower and fruit of labor; that in my intimate per- 
sonal contact with matter I had learned that it is but a symbol 
of spirit: matter had become the interpreter of higher things. 
Labor was the nexus which had linked matter with spirit, and 
through it, gradually, the many problems that confront my 
awakening soul are becoming plain and intelligible. Now 
when I address the elemental forms of rock and soil or the 
more spiritualized form of plant life, or my own inner con- 
sciousness, they all speak the same language, and proclaim 
