18 
HOUSE & GARDEN 
S OME day I am going to consort with an accountant. And I will 
ask him these questions : 
“Why is it necessary for a man, when he is spending money, to 
figure up what that same money would have brought him had he not 
spent it ?” 
“Why is it necessary to be eternally computing that matter 
of 6% ?■’’ 
A man buys a house in the country, for example. He wants to 
live in the country, he wants his children and wife to have the benefit 
of country air and good fresh vegetables, he wants to be able to leave 
the noise and bustle of the city behind him at nights and come back 
to the quiet little place where he can sleep and rest in peace and 
where, of Sundays, he can potter around his garden. So he invests 
$10,000—but forthwith begins to compute a loss of 6% ! 
Or he may buy a car. The car will take him and his children 
bowling along pleasant roads, it will meet him at the station when 
he comes home tired from the office, it will carry his wife to market. 
But before he has paid out a penny of the money he must, to keep 
his books straight, figure that he is a loser! 
I am wondering if pleasure and health aren’t worth more than six 
per cent: if the reminiscence of happy days isn't a return bigger 
than any interest money can bring. Perhaps the accountant can say. 
There was the case of my friend Gilford. 
G ilford came into my world the night I fell among brokers. 
They were pouchy men who wore silk hats, rode in limous¬ 
ines and could eat filet whenever they wanted to. They also smoked 
good cigars. I enjoyed their cigars. But even more I enjoyed their 
conversation. It was perfectly unintelligible, yet it was interesting. 
After they had tired of markets and margins and' the various 
financial enfants de guerre, they fell to talking about the.ways they 
spent their money. Brokers do that sometimes, even the best of 
them. Mind you, they didn’t come out in the open about it, they 
didn’t boast—they spoke covertly and made hints, and I saw giddy 
visions of these cousins of Croesus who had so much pelf that they 
could afford to spurn it. 
One went in for Rolls Royces; another remarked that a wife and 
family were expensive luxuries. Gilford, a little fellow with rosy, 
apple-colored cheeks and grey hair, confessed he spent $20,000 last 
year on his garden. 
We started up. “On a garden? Winter Garden or . . . ?” 
‘‘No, flower garden.” 
“And what did your investment yield you?” 
“Flowers.” 
“That all ?” 
“That's all I wanted.” 
Now, had he said his investment 
yielded him a high grade of vegetables 
that he marketed at a good profit, no one 
would have been surprised. But flowers 
—pretty things to look at and to sniff, 
fragile things that fade before dawn— 
C’est niagnidque mais ce nest pas les 
affaires! 
Of course, no one understood Gilford. 
The idea of a man spending $20,000 a 
year for flowers does not enter into the 
calculations of most men. Little wonder 
that he blushed to see his heart uncovered. 
But he was proud of it, at the same time. 
If the market didn’t play tricks, he said 
he expected to pay much more next year. 
Before the night was over a different 
atmosphere pervaded the circle. It was 
as though a cleansing air had blown in 
from across stretches of lawn and wood¬ 
land. . . . On the way up the street one 
of them confided in a half-ashamed sort 
of way, “That man Gilford makes me 
look like a piker. He gets so much out of 
life.” No truer word has been spoken. 
The point wherein Gilford differed from all the rest was in his 
complete refusal to balance pleasure and health against money. He 
refused to spoil the good times he was having by computing how : 
much it cost. Gilford wasn’t a 6% man. He wasn’t satisfied with | 
getting a paltry 6% out of his life. He looked on life as a 100% in- j 
vestment—and you saw it in his color and the clearness of his eye. J 
Later I saw more of it when I walked with him through his I 
garden. He showed the sort of quiet pride an artist takes in 
his work. It was a creation of his very own. He had thought out 
the pastel shades of the border.s—the soft blues of the delphiniums 
at the hack and the gradations of color through the aquilegia and j 
niyosotis. The rose garden was his idea too, and the rockerie down ! 
by the gate where the arabis settled like white clouds on the mossy ; 
boulders. 
Gilford had been playing partner to Nature that year. Lie had ; 
iiwested $20,000 in the firm. To be sure, he was drawing a 
staggering interest in pleasure and health and pride. But 6% ! 
What did 6% mean to him? He was playing for bigger stakes! , 
He was reaching out for bigger game ! 
That was the way he looked at the house and the cars and 
everything about the place. He had one fortune to invest—and i 
that was his life, and he planned to invest it where it would bring | 
the biggest returns. He had written his philosophy all over the I 
place. You read it in the flowers, in the velvet lawns, in the clean j 
kept paths, in the well ordered house. You saw it in the stalwart | 
limbs of the oaks and the swaying elms wrote it on the sky. It j 
came as a voice from every bush and bower. Your ears rang with j 
the motto: “It is more important to make life than a living.” j 
M en are divided into these two classes—the 6% and the 100% 
the men who balance their books with figures and the men 
who balance them with flowers. 
Especially does this apply to men who aspire to country homes 
and motors and dogs and gardens and all the other accessories 
necessary to country living. 
Before a man decides to go there and acquire all these conven- 
niences he must, if he values, his soul’s peace, acknowledge to which 
class he belongs. For he will get out of his investment not according 
to the amount of money he puts in but according to the enthusiasm 
he brings to it. 
He cannot draw all money and all health from the same invest¬ 
ment. Something must be charged ofif against life and flowers, 
against the warmth of sunshine and the cool of rain, against sunsets 
and drifting clouds and the wind through 
the trees. . 
P erhaps the day will come when a 
man will figure up his health and 
pleasure in the same way he now figures 
on money. Plow much can he afford to 
invest? How much dare he spend? He 
will sit down and calculate if a flower 
garden is a good investment and if the 
privet hedge will pay in privacy, and if 
the sight of long shadows on a lawn will 
bring their worth in pleasure to his eyes. 
These are matters that the world 
would call silly and sentimental yet they 
are the very foundation of life and liv¬ 
ing. They were the things men once 
worshipped. For a time the temple was 
desei'ted, but now slowly men are return¬ 
ing to it, finding there a solace for their 
busy, hustling days, and freedom from 
the demands of the modern American life. 
Eventually, if we are to reap a hundred 
per cent benefit for investments, we must 
evaluate country living according to its 
own terms; and the terms of the country 
are peace and health and ease and free¬ 
dom. What is 6% compared to them ? 
TO BE WRITTEN SOME¬ 
TIME ON A STO.NE 
I have lived with my arm about Life’s 
shoulder: 
Love hath been my staff and my up¬ 
holder. 
My house and my couch and my cup of 
wine .... 
Quick, bathe my feet. Death, while Love 
is mine. 
And lay me in spun flax where no stars 
shine. 
WxLL.xRD Wattles. 
