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it opens through a gate, instead of a rail fence or pair of bars, which 
gate has a latch instead of a wooden pin. By the sunny side of the 
house, beneath the shade of a venerable tree, hangs a safe and commodious 
children’s swing, which has cost him only a little labor on a rainy day, 
and which time is thus employed in preference to spending rainy days 
and hard earned money in country taverns and groceries, as is too often 
the case. Costing so little, who can tell the value of that swing to the 
young and so easily made happy rising generation ? Just in the rear of the 
house is a well arranged, well stocked kitchen garden; in which the good 
lady of the house, who, let me remark, is not so good as to be good for 
* 
nothing, like many of the fine rag-baby ladies of the present day, often 
spends an hour to the benefit of her own health as well as to the benefit 
of the garden. Just adjoining stands the orchard, a neat inclosure appro¬ 
priated expressly to that purpose. The trees are fine, erect, and thrifty, 
some would have leaned, but they were carefully staked and tied upright in 
■season ; they are just beginning to bear profusely, and the quality of the 
fruit shows that the owner did not buy his trees of some miserable ven¬ 
dor travelling through the country, but went to a good nursery, and in¬ 
telligently selected them—selecting those not only of good varieties, but 
of good quality and size ; albeit they cost a little more. After being se¬ 
lected they were equally carefully transplanted and subsequently good 
care taken of them. No worms nest has found a resting place upon their 
branches from year to year, nor have they lacked for washing, scrubbing, 
hoeing and pruning—although this has all been the work of leisure mo¬ 
ments. Now he is reaping a rich reward, and is almost envied by his 
neighbors, who consider him a wonderfully lucky man. They have al¬ 
ways intended to plant orchards, and thought of doing it even before he 
set his, but never could quite get the time, although they have spent 
weeks and months of that time doing nothing, or that which was worse 
than nothing. One or two of them did set a few inferior trees, which they 
had a chance to buy cheap, and on credit, from a pedlar; but being set 
in the grass, strange to say, they did not grow, and after being run over 
for a couple of years by divers animals, and used as stakes to which to 
tie the clothes-line, they died—much to the disappointment of the owners, 
who, on the whole, conclude that their land was not well adapted to 
fruit growing. 
