TARRYTOWN LETTERS. 



613 



run 48 hours without re-filling, and to control the 

 flame a special form of extinguisher must be used. 



Setting aside the automatic side of these improve- 

 ments, the house itself is worthy of imitation, as it 

 is portable, and because it can be operated at great 

 economy of fuel. The peculiar form of ventilation 

 is also a good idea, even if the valve has to be 

 operated by hand, because it prevents back drafts 

 of cold air and saves the heat of the sun and fire. 



Mr. Barnard was assisted in his experiments by 

 George A. Weber, of Stamford, and their in- 

 ventions and improvements are offered by The 

 American Garden to the free use of all who are in- 

 terested in the use of glass in horticulture. The 

 idea of heating greenhouses by gas or oil can also 

 be applied to hot-beds, and it is the intention of 

 The American Garden to soon lay plans for a new 

 system of hot-beds before its readers. 



TARRYTOWN LETTERS— XII. 



a trade suspicion confuted — MRS. tarryer s weeding thimble, and how it works. 



BY A. B. TARRYER. 



I^OM the way trade and magazine 

 writing goes nowadays, many 

 excellent people have supposed, 

 i n spite o f Mrs. Tarryer's 

 desires to the contrary, that 

 the illustrated letters in the 

 May and June numbers of the 

 Garden, giving an account of 

 certain weeding-tools, were but a thin cover for an 

 implement business, and that the desirable tools pic- 

 tured could be bought, if only word could be got 

 through to Mrs. Tarryer that such were wanted 

 in sundry places. Ready trade pops at the touch 

 of a single postage-stamp, but chaotic realities of 

 the future only crystallize after years of patient 

 thought and work. Mrs. Tarryer is as helpless in 

 the matter of garden-tools as anybody else is, 

 except that she has long known how some of them 

 should be made, and has labored for many years 

 to provide herself and, incidentally a few friends, 

 with weapons of precision for governing the garden. 

 But there is no more trade or manufacture of her 

 styles of garden-tools at present than of pipes for 

 the American mound-builders. Her implements 

 were portrayed in the Garden so that our nakedness 

 of fit tools for hand-weeding — while the land is 

 being overrun with "worthless botany," as Parson 

 Camperdown calls weeds — might become better un- 

 derstood, and in the hope of creating the demand 

 manufacture requires to set its wheels in motion. 



Mrs. Tarryer's many friends, visitors and corres- 

 pondents are hurt in their feelings, sometimes, 

 because she can't give or sell some favorite garden- 

 tool to those who really want and need it to be quite 

 happy. She sympathizes deeply with such cases, 

 for they can't see, in the midst of our whirling 

 machinery, why it is not easy as rolling off a log to 

 get her hand-tillage implements duplicated without 



number. When our girls and boys go forth gaily 

 into the garden with elegant and efficient means in 

 their hands for conquering the weeds there, it is 

 extremely difficult, for one who has not observed 

 widely and thought deeply of this matter of weed- 

 ing and tool-making, to realize that there is not a 

 mill close by turning out cords of Mrs. Tarryer's 

 weeders. 



It is, indeed, a wonder how within forty or fifty 

 years the country smith who could make beautiful 

 axes, hay-forks, hand-irons, or embody to order any 

 other domestic idea in metal, has become utterly 

 extinct and gone, and how his place is poorly filled 

 with the produce of factories and men who fashion 

 things by models, often degraded, that do not fit our 

 growing cultures, and of whose original intention 

 the hurried artificers know or care nothing. 



No doubt Mrs. Tarryer has intended all these 

 recent years, that sometime her tools should be 

 well made, and in sufficient numbers for the discern- 

 ing cultivators who select and buy for their own 

 uses. She has tried her weeders in the hands of all 

 sorts of people to bring out their worst as well as 

 best points with a view to perfection. Often have I 

 seen her face wince at the casual remark of one 

 who was using her hoes for the first time, when she 

 got a new idea, and I knew it would cost ^25, ^50, 

 or $\oo to realize it exactly in a single sample. 



I have been to the bosses of factories with her, 

 and she has invited some of the best of them to 

 Tarry town. " Do you expect to have that thing 

 made for Irish, Swedes, Norwegians, Poles, or 

 Italians?" (specifying the foreign brethren mostin- 

 clined, in his opinion, to break things), would often 

 be the first question, when the extreme lightness and 

 keenness of some of her implements was first felt 

 in the surprised hand of a manufacturer. After a 

 good dinner and a survey of Mrs. Tarryer's garden- 



