11111*11^ SCHOOL GARDENS lllllllllllllllilllllilltlllllll^ 
alleys and all got garbage pails, and had garbage collection regular—it 
don’t cost as much as you think if you’d take the trouble to find out. 
Don t you see how it all hangs together? Flies and garbage and children 
playing wild in the street—we could touch them all, same time. Suppose 
we planted trees in Court House Park.’ 
“Mis’ Postmaster Sykes had stood about as much as she could stand. 
That woman does hate anybody to even hint that everything isn’t just 
elegant the way it is. 
“‘Who’s going to do all this planting, Pd like to know?’ she asks, 
crisp. 
“I started to answer, when just that minute, I saw the answer out in 
the street. Down the side-walk they were coming, from ‘Hornet Hill— 
Binnie Mince, and the whole twenty of the children, with their baskets 
of violets and buttercup plants, taking them home. 
“ ‘Look there,’ I says, ‘There’s some of who’ll do it. In one Arbor 
Day they could plant the Court House yard, so be we bought the trees 
and showed them how. And in one summer—in one summer, if only 
we’d make it easy for them to get the flower seeds, the yards of this whole 
town would blossom into gardens—and the children would do it.’ 
“Nobody said anything. We all sat looking after the children, going 
down the street. Only me—I never do know when to stop, and I had 
to give them a little final word. 
“ ‘An annual flower show,’ I says, ‘A children’s annual flower and 
vegetable show—held in the Fall—in the City Hall or the School House— 
with prizes give by the business men—and a bulb for every child whether 
he got a prize or not— can't you see it? Can’t you see them? Oh, my 
friends, do you think an iron fence for the Cemetery is so much more 
important ?’ 
“Some of them folded up their work, then, and one or two of them 
looked over to me and nodded a little. And I kind of thought maybe 
I’d planted a seed—I didn’t know if I had or if I hadn’t. But I didn’t 
wait to see it grow. I slipped out, and on the way home I stopped in at 
Binnie Mince’s, to watch him out in the back yard making his little 
garden—the way every single child in the w hole wide world loves to do. 
“Don’t it seem as if that must mean something? Something big?” 
iiiiiiimiiiiiiiiiiimiiiiiiiiiimiiiiiiiimiiiiimmimiiiiiiiiiii 
hi ...limn.....in hi ii ilium iimiiimi iiii 
41 
