62 
GARDENS AND THEIR MEANING 
grow to-day on the spot where one grew yesterday. Feats 
like this (for feats they truly are) stand for something greater 
than mere individual triumphs. In so far as these dis- 
coveries benefit the world, they are justly valued as forms 
of high social service, and they win distinction accordingly. 
All other schemes come to a standstill while the little farm 
is being correctly staked, the survey recorded, and a map 
drawn to scale, giving each detail, the points of the compass 
included. Now is the time when slow and steady wins the 
race, for not only must the measurements be taken deliber- 
ately, but they must be verified many times over, and from 
a number of different starting points. In the lexicon of the 
young surveyor there is no such word as haste. At this stage 
one careless slip has more than once been the undoing of a 
beautiful plan. 
The task of surveying a home garden, even though it 
should be divided into plots, is of course comparatively slight ; 
but when a whole class — including the quick and the slow, 
the lame and the lazy — undertakes to plot a school garden 
in concert, each doing his share, surveying becomes quite a 
different story. This is indeed exploration. 
The children set out together like a band of pilgrims. Now 
any such company, starting on a quest, would surely expect, 
sometime in their course, to see rising up before them the hill 
Difficulty. Indeed, they would be honestly disappointed to find 
the experimental life on too " dead-easy ” a level. But some- 
how they do not look for this hill at the very start-off. Never- 
theless, — there is no disguising the fact, — it is looming up 
already in the path of our young friends in the shape of a prob- 
lem in plotting. To-day, as of old, there is a choice of ways. 
One way curves conveniently around its base ; this means 
that older persons may do all or most of the thinking, — 
a responsibility which, out of a mistaken sense of kindness, 
