entured on the planting of a single strawberry. Success,
situated as I was, was dependent on united effort, the cooeperation of
all. This cooeperation of the entire family must be still more necessary
in agricultural undertakings on a large scale. A wife, taken reluctantly
from the city to a farm, with no taste for rural life, no love of
flowers, no fondness for the garden, no appreciation of the mysteries of
seed-time and harvest, no sensibility to fields of clover, to green
meadows, to the grateful silence of the woods, or to the voices of
birds, and who pines for the unforgotten charms of city life, may mar
the otherwise assured happiness of the household. One refractory inmate
in ours would have been especially calamitous.

The floral world is pervaded with miraculous sympathies. Another spring
had opened on our garden, and flower after flower came out into gorgeous
bloom. My strawberries, as if conscious of the display around them, and
ambitious to increase it, opened their white blossoms toward the close
of April. Those set the preceding autumn gave promise of an abundant
yield, but not equal to that presented by the runners which crowded
around the parent plants on the original half-acre. The winter had been
unfriendly, sending no heavy covering of snow to shelter them; while
the frost, in making its first escape from the earth, had loosened many
plants, bringing some of them half-way out of the ground, while a few
had been thrown entirely upon the surface, where they quickly perished.

I had read that accidents of this kind would sometimes happen, and that,
when plants were thus partially dislodged by frost, the roller must be
passed over them to crowd back the roots into their proper places. I had
discovered this derangement immediately on the frost escaping, but we
had neither roller nor substitute. As pressure alone was needed, I set
Fred to walking over the entire acre, and with his heavy winter boots to
trample down each plant in its old place. The operation was every way as
beneficial as if the ground had been well rolled. When performed before
the roots have been many days exposed to the air, it not only does no
injury, but effectually repairs all damage committed by the frost.

Everything, this second season, was on a larger scale than before,
requiring greater care and labor, but at the same time brightening my
hopes and doubling my anticipations. I was compelled to hire a gardener
occasionally to assi