| HOUSE AND GARDEN | 
September, 1913 
1 77 
covered by trees and vines and moss and 
ferns and flowers as nature originally 
clothed them, the melting snow and* ice 
would be absorbed by this foliage and 
there would be no unnatural floods. Sim¬ 
ile: Cover a slanting shelf with moss or 
sponge; pour water on the shelf and the 
moss or sponge will absorb the water, at 
least enough of it to prevent a serious 
overflow. Now take away the absorbing 
material and pour water on the barren 
shelf, and the water will flow off the shelf 
and flood the lower level — the valley with 
its town and townspeople. It’s all very 
simple, and the men who claim they do not 
know the cause of the damaging floods and 
who are trying to appropriate great State 
funds, Government funds and personal 
(individual) funds to build so-called walls 
and causeways to “prevent" future floods 
are rascals, political grafters and would-be 
pilferers of the people’s money. 
The honest and practical way to prevent 
floods is to restore the foliage to the bar¬ 
ren hills—plant trees and bushes on the 
unsightly mounts, put back what we have 
wrongfully taken away from nature — and 
the grafters who want to pocket millions 
of dollars out of the fraudulent expense 
of building the silly walls and causeways 
know this better than anyone else. 
For the cost of every single stone or 
plank in the wall a thousand trees could be 
planted on the hills. Why not let our 
thousands of idle Indian children do this 
free-planting? They’d rather do this nat¬ 
ural health work in the open than practice 
the white man’s unnecessary, unnatural 
pursuit—the indoor study of arithmetic, 
etc.—in the paleface’s stuffy, tuberculous- 
breeding schoolroom. 
Propagating tree, vine and flower life is 
the true way, the scientific way, God’s 
way, of preventing life-destroying floods, 
but, in the interest of graft, the politicians 
pretend not to know this, and with graft 
they have made political bargains and 
bribed into silence the men of science who 
admit they do know, these men whose duty 
to their fellow-beings is to publicly ex¬ 
plain the cause and cure of the unnatural 
condition and whose further duty should 
be to expose the dishonest men who would 
make vulgar monetary capital out of the 
people's adversity. Charles Bradford 
Preserving Vegetables 
A NUMBER of things which cannot be 
kept by simple storing may be pre¬ 
served or canned in glass jars or cans, and 
it will be a great economy to supply one’s- 
self with an adequate supply of jars or 
canning outfit. Where there is a large 
garden with a considerable amount of pro¬ 
duce which would otherwise go to waste, 
it will pay to get a tinning outfit. The 
empty tin cans cost very little and the 
work can easily be done. And then, of 
course, a goodly supply should be made 
of the various pickles and sauces. 
The Keyhole Comes 
to Meet You 
It is in the knob of a CORBIN UNIT LOCK ' 
where it cannot be missed, even in the dark. There 
is no other lock as good for the entrance doors to res¬ 
idences. The best hardware dealers sell it. We 
1 make it. . 
P. & F. Corbin 
Division 
The American Hardware Corporation 
NEW BRITAIN, CONNECTICUT 
Chicago N'*"' 'Vnrh- Philadelphia 
A beautiful reproduction of the 
PRINCESS ENA 
The striking new 
Orchid Pink Poppy 
forms the front cover page of the 
Fall Specialty Number of 
MEEHANS’ GARDEN BULLETIN 
The rear cover shows the red and yellow berried bush honeysuckle. 
Between is a wealth of information for garden lovers; compiled by prac¬ 
tical men trained by the 
Pioneer Nurserymen of America 
Thomas Meehan & Sons, Box 40, Germantown, Philadelphia 
In writing to advertisers please mention House & Garden 
