14 
FAITH. 
"What thing is faith? Ask thou the gleesome boy 
'W ho for the first time breasts the buoyant wave; 
^Tis faith that leads him with adventurous joy 
To follow where they plunge, his comrades brave. 
-Ask thou the boor who eats and drinks and sleeps, 
And loves and hates and hopes, and fears and 
Pi-ays, 
Fishes and fowls, work-day and Sabbath keeps, 
And, where life's sign-post points his path, obeys. 
Or ask the sage with subtle-searching looks, 
Well trained all things in heaven and earth to scan; 
Or ask the scholar primed with Greekish books: 
All live by faith of w r hat is best in man. 
Or him, sharp eyed, with fine atomic science, 
The loves and hates of lively dust pursuing; 
Who tortures Nature with all strange appliances 
To drag to light the secret of her doing. 
Ask thou the captain who with guess sublime 
Mapped forth new worlds on his night-watching 
pillow, 
And saw in vision a fresh start of time, 
Big with grand hopes beyond the Atlantic billow. 
Ask thou the soldier who on bristling lances 
Rushes undaunted, breathing valorous breath, 
And, where his leader cheers him on, advances 
To glorious victory o’er huge heaps of death. 
■Or ask the patriot who, when foes were strong, 
And faithless friends had sold their rights for pelf, 
Waits till harsh need and shame rouse the base 
throng 
Into the liigh-souled echo of himself. 
Ask thou the statesman, when the infuriate mob 
Brays senseless vetoes on his wisest plans; 
Unmoved he stands, his bosom knows no throb; 
His eye the calm evolving future scans. 
Or ask the martyr, who, when tyrants tear 
His quivering flesh, with calm assurance dies; 
Bweet life he loves, but scorns to breath an air 
Drugged with the taint of soul-destroying lies. 
In such know faith, faith or in man or God, 
In thine own heart, or tried tradition’s stream; 
’Tis one same sun that paints the flowery sod, 
And shoots from pole to pole the quickening beam. 
'God is the powder which shapes this pictured scene, 
Soul of all creatures, substance of all creeds, 
Faith intuition quick and instinct keen 
To know His voice and follow where He leads. 
—John Stuart Blackie , in Cassell's Family Maga¬ 
zine for June. 
Seed Growing in America 
The successful market gardener must 
unite the qualifications of the trucker, farmer 
merchant and the philosopher, for he must 
investigate the laws of vegetation as well 
as the laws of sale. Advanced market 
gardening, thus it will be seen, is a tech¬ 
nical pursuit and one requiring consider¬ 
able means and a consideration of cost may 
not be out of place. The capital required 
in market gardening far exceeds ordinary 
farming. The suburban market gardens 
about Philadelphia are only worked at 
double the expense of others more remote 
—quite five hundred dollars per acre being 
the capital necessary to stock and conduct 
them. 
This extraordinary expense is somewhat 
balanced by the frequency with which 
such gardeners can send their vegetables to 
market, and the fresh condition in which 
they are delivered, whereas the distant 
country gardener has to consign his produce 
to commission men, taking such prices as 
the market affords under forced sales. 
High as may seem the estimate of $500 
per acre as necessary capital, it is nothing 
compared with the expenses of some market 
gardeners near London and Paris. Land 
on the outskirts of those cities rents for 
$200 and $800 per acre, often twice that 
much. In the suburbs of Paris the writer 
has visited a market garden of three acres 
which annually pays a rental of $1800 and 
yet affords a large profit to its intelligent 
cultivator. 
From this hasty review of market gar¬ 
dening one readily perceives that in it is 
invested a deal of capital guided by intelli¬ 
gence and technical experience. Success, 
however, hinges firstly upon the purity of 
the seeds sown, and it is here the seedsman 
enters the arena as an active participant— 
one weilding an immense power for good 
or evil. 
Seedsmen may be divided into two classes 
—merchants and seed growers. 
The grower of seeds must be, first of all, 
an able gardener or else he will fail in the 
beginning, for he must do all that the truck¬ 
er does, and then he is only half-way 
through—he must await, after the devel¬ 
opment of a vegetable fit for market, the 
production of seed. He is thus twice a 
cultivator, running twice the risks of a 
market gardener, wet and drought, heat 
and cold, tornado and insect injuries, 
insufficient or excessive fertility. The 
intelligent seed grower, recognizing the 
superiority of individual plant in physical 
