A GARDEN TN another part of this magazine is 
LEGACY A an article that paints the picture 
of a garden that a child once played 
in. It was a garden that was a part of her existence and that 
seemed as permanent as nature itself. Probably it seemed to the 
child that the old house and its grounds had always been 
there and always would, and it naturally grew to be a part 
of her life. She could watch the growth of the tall foxgloves, 
from the tangled rubbish that winter left, could see the wonderful 
reawakening of the lifeless ugliness that the chill winds of 
March tossed about so cruelly. When June days came, the un¬ 
folded mystery of new life made its call upon her imagination 
and upon her senses. The garden was a wonderful treasure- 
house —full of the riches of the finest perfume, with the great 
bounty of color spilled so lavishly everywhere. Then, too, came 
the little comrades that were so much more satisfying than dolls 
and toys— the floating butterflies, the yellow-velvet cloaked bee 
grumbling at his business, the pert robin leaning eagerly forward 
in his hurried scamper or pausing, head tilted critically, before he 
pulled the wriggling worm from his sod home. 
The garden was a rare playhouse with real and fancied in¬ 
mates — the last, perhaps, as valued as the first. The strange, 
shadowed caverns between the close growing plants were the 
homes of the '“little people,” the fairies. On summer mornings 
among the long shadows and the flash of the dew, they were 
awefully real — indeed their tiny voices could almost be heard 
fading away before the full splendor of the growing day. Oh, it 
was all real, and all so crammed with delight. 
There is no substitute for the garden in the life of a child. 
Some unerring instinct leads children to understand and appre¬ 
ciate and love it all. Nor can the good that it does be calculated, 
but the days spent there seem to start a growth, parallel to that 
of the shrubs and plants, of mind and soul and bodily health. 
And you, the grown child, what would it mean now to turn 
in at the gate of grandmother’s garden to-day? The host 
of memories crowding there are only dream-children, but the 
touch of your hand on the gatepost, you know would bring them 
trooping before you. You who descant against the impiety of the 
race, are you doing anything to make this home of yours to be 
cherished afterwards ? Or is it only the four walls with no as¬ 
sociations within them or about them, without a tree or shrub or 
plant to give it life? If that is the case, there will be no more 
grandmother’s gardens, no more old-fashioned things for the 
generation coming after us, no love for old associations. The 
home places that are legacies will be converted into cash, because 
they lack memory’s wealth of the imaginative experiences of 
childhood that would make them of greater price than money. 
Forget all the other things then, and this is reason enough for 
your garden. It is a legacy which the donor enjoys with the 
legatee, and an investment that compounds its interest to you 
and yours the longer it lasts —an investment in a lifetime happi¬ 
ness. 
MUTUAL T T was only a humble, little apple, 
BENEFIT A probably worm-eaten, that was 
the cause of our learning all about 
the laws of gravitation. Perhaps if the farmer had sprayed the 
trees in Ike Newton’s garden, the apple would not have fallen, 
and we might still be ignorant of hundreds and hundreds of 
things, and carelessly might walk off the roof with absolute con¬ 
viction that we would be wafted softly down to earth. That is 
■only by the way, however, and is perhaps the one exception to 
the rule that truth never grows out of error. 
To return to Ike, greater than the good of his formulation of 
laws was the fact that he was one of the first to adapt experi¬ 
mental reasoning — to note the results of his experiences, and 
draw conclusions from phenomena about him rather than to get 
results merely from mental cogitations. Since he established this 
manner of thinking as the most approved method, much has 
been accomplished, and great results come from the most ordi¬ 
nary causes. In a way, we are all potential Newtons in our gar¬ 
dens. Perhaps there is something of just as much value to hu¬ 
manity that can grow out of the simple operations of our garden. 
At any rate, there is bound to be much that will interest those 
struggling as we are. Our successes have, perhaps, just the 
one thing that another has been trying to find out; our failures 
may be sufficient warning to save someone else that year which 
they lost us. Modesty is becoming, but in this case is out of 
place. Wouldn’t it be much better to make public the important 
things in our experiences. Insignificant as they may be as iso¬ 
lated occurrences, as steps in the advancement of knowledge 
they may loom up large. The falling apple was not of much in¬ 
trinsic moment, so, who knows, the fruits of your gardening 
labors may strike some Newton on the head and bring as aston¬ 
ishing a revelation. 
SKUNK TI^HILE the conflict rages over 
FARMING » V the pros and cons of the 
“Back to Nature Movement,” the pa¬ 
ternal government works on in its mysteries aiding the man who 
lives in the country. Now it is working on the elimination of 
waste, and making I'apid strides in the use of by-products. But 
all the previous experiments pale before the recent work of the 
Department, as described in a pamphlet sent out lately. Better 
than increasing the yield of wheat, or doubling the number of 
alfalfa crops, or introducing Prof. Bailey’s “Drama of the Soil,” is 
this last achievement. It is the introduction of a profitable diver¬ 
sion for the farmer— the breeding of the humble, roadside skunk. 
Your boyhood experiences must stand vividly before you at 
this knowledge. Perhaps you were an innocent, well-meaning 
boy, and there is the touch of pique that the sober, old Govern¬ 
ment could quite outdo your harmless machinations. How much 
better it would have been when you induced your city cousin to 
catch the nice pussy that was out back of the chicken yard, if 
later you could have produced a government pamphlet in your 
defence and demonstrated that you were only starting Clarence 
out to be a successful farmer. Perhaps, then, the chair would not 
have felt so hot when you finally nerved yourself to sit down in 
your woodshed seclusion. But, at any rate, you did not have to 
officiate at the interment of Clarence’s store clothes, and there 
was some consolation in the fact that they were almost boiling 
him alive in the tub, and at the same time suffocating him in the 
smoke from Chinese punk. Oh, it is just as well to let bygones 
be bygones, but what a useful thing that pamphlet would have 
been when you were a lad! 
But to spread the glad tidings farther. “If,” so says the 
pamphlet, “if the cost of rearing the skunks does not exceed the 
value of the fur the best black skins would probably aUow a 
margin of profit.” If, again, the playful creatures do not eat one 
another up you should make money. No courageous spirit should 
be checked by these possibilities, however, and should enclose the 
acre of ground as recommended — the pamphlet says at least one 
acre for every fifty skunks. To start in a small way, one might 
fence in that acre strawberry field next to Neighbor Brown’s— 
leaving a break at the point his chickens usually come through 
the present fence — just to be polite and neighborly. 
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