on't dare to speak about when some one comes to make
a formal call. I love flowers so much that it seemed as if I must have a
few where I could see them, while I was busy in the kitchen. You know, a
woman who does her own housework can't stop every time she'd like to to
run out to the front-yard garden. So I began to plant hardy things here,
and I've kept on ever since, till I've quite a collection, as you see.
Just odds and ends of the plants that seem most like folks, you know. It
doesn't amount to much as a garden, I suppose most folks would think,
but you've no idea of the pleasure I get out of it. Sometimes when I get
all fagged out over housework I go out and pull weeds in it, and hoe a
little, and train up the vines, and the first I know I'm ready to go
back to work, with the tired feeling all gone. And do you know--the
plants seem to enjoy it as much as I do? They seem to grow better here
than I could ever coax them to do in the front yard. But that's probably
because they get the slops from the kitchen, and the soap-suds, every
wash-day. It doesn't seem as if I worked among them at all. It's just
play. The fresh air of outdoors does me more good, I'm sure, than all
the doctors' tonics. And I'm not the only one in the family that enjoys
them. The children take a good deal of pride in 'mother's garden,' and
my husband took time, one day, in the busiest part of the season, to put
up that frame by the door, to train Morning Glories over."

In this ideal home-garden were old-fashioned Madonna Lilies, such as I
had not seen for years, and Bouncing Bets, ragged and saucy as ever, and
Southernwood, that gave off spicy odors every time one touched it, and
Aquilegias in blue and white and red, Life Everlasting, and Moss Pink,
and that most delicious of all old-fashioned garden flowers, the Spice
Pink, with its fringed petals marked with maroon, as if some wayside
artist had touched each one with a brush dipped in that color for the
simple mischief of the thing, and Hollyhocks, Rockets--almost all the
old "stand-bys." There was not one "new" flower there. If it had been,
it would have seemed out of place. The Morning Glories were just getting
well under way, and were only half-way up the door-frame, but I could
see, with my mind's eye, what a beautiful awning they would make a
little later. I could imagine them peering into the kitchen, like saucy,
fun-loving children, and laughing good-morning to the woman who "loved
flow