IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIM SCHOOL GARDENS IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIM^ 
all up the green slope now I saw children, pretty near twenty of them, 
scattered around, all of ’em with baskets and all of them digging violet 
plants and buttercups. Friendship Village children, that had all come 
out in the Spring to dig violets and buttercups! 
“Any other time Fd have told them to pick the flowers if they wanted 
to, but to leave the plants there, that belonged to us all. But someway 
all I could think of now was that homely little country town of ours, 
down there in the midst of Spring. I wondered how much they noticed 
it. And all of a sudden, standing down the hill, I called up to them on 
the slope: 
“ ‘Children!’ I says, ‘Look! What’s the prettiest thing you can see 
from this hill?’ 
“They answered me, first one and then another: ‘The river!’ ‘Thomp¬ 
son’s orchard!’ ‘The sky!’ ‘The flowers!’ There was the village, right 
before them, where most of them had lived all their lives, but not one of 
them even thought of counting that in. So pretty soon I says: 
“ ‘What about the village ? Isn’t that pretty ?’ 
“There was a little Swiss girl with them, who had come over a few 
years before and lived with her family on the edge of the town. And 
she burst out laughing. 
“ ‘O!’ she says—stepping careful in among her words, and pro¬ 
nouncing ’em some like strangers, but in a way that was awful sweet¬ 
sounding too—‘O! In my town they had a castle and a bridge and a big 
gate and a nice tower. That was pretty. But this village-—it was so funny!” 
“It was true. The village was funny and ugly and mean. And it 
was’t all clean. And out here were twenty of its future citizens who 
had known enough to come away from it, out into the Spring, to find 
plants for their gardens. I looked at them, and I begun wondering how 
long it’d be before they got just like the rest of us, that never even think 
much about how ugly the village is. 
“ ‘They know pretty things now, anyhow,’ I thought. ‘I’ll see if they 
don’t.’ So I calls up to them:’ 
“ ‘Look here, all of you! What’s the prettiest things in the world. 
Tell me some!’ 
“What do you guess they said? Not stars or mountains or rivers 
or oceans or moonlight or the forest or the sunset. And not one of the 
things that it takes much money to buy. But two or three of them said it 
first—and then more of them—and finally they shouted it all together: 
“ ‘Why—flowers!’ 
“ Flowers! The minute they said it, I knew I thought so too. The 
blue violets on the bank, the cowslips on the edge of the water, the apple 
blossoms budding in the orchard across the road, my bulbs by the kitchen 
door—what was there lovelier in the whole world, anyway? And the 
children knew! And they’d come out to Hornet Hill to find them. 
“So they are,’ ‘I says, kind of reverent.’ So they are. What you 
going to do with these you’re digging? I ask’ them. 
“And they all said, as Binnie had said: ‘Make us a little garden, in 
our back yard.’ And some of ’em told me about the patch of ground 
under a window, or on the edge of the potatoes, that their folks had gFe 
them for their own. ‘I got mine by the alley fence,’ says the little 
Swiss girl. 
. ..... • H111 ii 1111 ii n 111 m i n 111 IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII ....IIIIHI" 
39 
