CHILDHOOD IN THE GARDEN 
Unluckily, many people who have children do not 
own gardens, or at best spend but a short period of the 
year within reach of them, and there are many thou¬ 
sands of boys and girls who never know what it is to 
work in the ground. In an effort to overcome this sad 
condition, school gardens have been started in different 
municipalities, particularly the Middle West. Children 
who, driven from the streets to the tenement-houses 
and back again, had learned everything of which a 
child should be ignorant, and who had come to act in 
ways thoroughly appropriate to their hard and hideous 
surroundings, were taken to these gardens and set to 
work. 
The result was and continues to be wonderful. Like 
Antaeus renewing his strength at each contact with the 
earth, these children acquired a youth and joy they had 
never known, turned, in fact, into real children, digging 
up, as it were, out of the ground they worked, that in¬ 
nocence and happiness which should have been their 
birthright Small lads of six and eight, already marked 
in the books of the law as “ incorrigibles,” toiled at 
the new labor, becoming almost what they ought to be 
at that age. Brown, lusty, red-cheeked under their 
broad straw hats, looking confidently up into your face 
as you came to see them at their planting, these “ in¬ 
corrigibles” strove with one another to produce the 
largest tomatoes, the fattest peas or beans, the most 
radiant nasturtiums or finest geraniums, pouring into 
