ers so well she couldn't get along without a few."

You see, she was successful with them because she loved them. Because of
that, the labor she bestowed upon them was play, not work. They were
friends of hers, and friendship never begrudges anything that gives
proof of its existence in a practical way. And the flowers, grateful for
the friendship which manifested itself in so many helpful ways, repaid
her generously in beauty and brightness and cheer by making themselves a
part of her daily life.

By all means, have a back-yard garden.

THE WILD GARDEN

A PLEA FOR OUR NATIVE PLANTS

Many persons, I find, are under the impression that we have few, if any,
native flowering plants and shrubs that are worthy a place in the
home-garden. They have been accustomed to consider them as "wild
things," and "weeds," forgetting or overlooking the fact that all plants
are wild things and weeds somewhere. So unfamiliar are they with many of
our commonest plants that they fail to recognize them when they meet
them outside their native haunts. Some years ago I transplanted a
Solidago,--better known as a "Golden Rod,"--from a fence-corner of the
pasture, and gave it a place in the home-garden. There it grew
luxuriantly, and soon became a great plant that sent up scores of stalks
each season as high as a man's head, every one of them crowned with a
plume of brilliant yellow flowers. The effect was simply magnificent.

One day an old neighbor came along, and stopped to chat with me as I
worked among my plants.

"That's a beauty," he said as he leaned across the fence near the Golden
Rod. "I don't know's I ever saw anything like it before. I reckon, now,
you paid a good deal of money for that plant."

"How much do you think it cost me?" I asked.

"Oh, I don't know," he answered, looking at the plant admiringly, and
then at some of foreign origin, near-by. He knew something about the
value of these, as he had one of them growing in his garden. He seemed
to be making a mental calculation, based on the relative beauty of the
plants, and presently he said:

"I ain't much of a judge of such things, but I wouldn't wonder if you
paid as much as three--mebby four--an' like's not five dollars for it."

"The plant cost me nothing but the labor of bringing it from the
pasture," I answered. "Don't you know what it is? There's any quantity
of it back of your barn, I notice."

"You don't mean to say that's yaller-weed," exclaimed t