INTRODUCTION 1 3 
them quite — if you please — according to orthodox rules. 
Where they had learned this still remains a mystery. 
All through the long summer’s heat this little band raked 
and watered and weeded, in fact fairly brooded over the rows 
of potato plants. These in time actually looked quite flour- 
ishing, and were extravagantly admired by many child visitors. 
But, sad to say, the season ended before they had produced 
a single potato large enough to cook. 
Here the tale might be expected to end. But no, the boys 
were not vanquished by what an ordinary critic would have 
called a wasted summer. The following spring found them 
once more at their neighbor’s door, with even more earnest 
pleadings, if possible, than before. In the meantime, how- 
ever, fresh difficulties had arisen in the shape of a new land- 
lord who did not want to bother about boys. And so the lads 
went their ways. Whatever the incident had meant to them, 
it was not without its value to her, and she would not dis- 
miss it without inquiring into it carefully. The movement, 
it seems, had owed its impulse and its execution chiefly to 
one boy, a born organizer. Gardening had somehow struck 
his fancy ; he saw in it the very magnet with which to attract 
his " gang.” Through his gift of leadership this arduous 
work had prospered, and of course the reason that it did not 
strike the children as a failure was that potatoes was only 
the opportunity for association, not the underlying purpose. 
No one who understood children could help sympathizing 
with the latent possibilities of such a situation. Tempting 
fields for mischief lay all about them — beckoned to them, 
in fact, from every alleyway. Yet they had chosen this area, 
which, though tiny, in its possibilities was vast. Far more 
remarkable than potatoes, there had flourished here a faith 
in cause and comrades which, in no mere figurative sense, 
could remove mountains. Faith like this forms the basis of 
