view.

[Illustration: "Having wages bigger than their bodily wants, and having
spiritual wants numerous and elastic enough to use up the surplus."

The owner of this cottage, who stands on the lawn, spaded and graded it
and grassed it herself, and by shrubbery plantings about the house's
foundation and on the outer boundaries of the grass has so transformed
it since this picture was taken as to win one of the highest prizes
awarded among more than a thousand competitors.]

[Illustration: "One such competing garden was so beautiful last year
that strangers driving by stopped and asked leave to dismount and enjoy
a nearer view."

A capital prize-winner's back yard which was a sand bank when he entered
the competition. His front yard is still handsomer.]

A certain garden to which we early awarded a high prize was, and yet
remains, among the loveliest in Northampton. Its house stands perhaps
seventy feet back from the public way and so nearly at one edge of its
broad lot that all its exits and entrances are away from that side and
toward the garden. A lawn and front bordered on side by loose hedges of
Regel's privet and Thunberg's barberry and with only one or two slim
trees of delicate foliage near its street line, rises slightly from the
sidewalk to the house in a smooth half wave that never sinks below any
level it has attained and yet consists of two curves. (It takes two
curves, let us say once more, to make even half of the gentlest wave
that can be made, if you take it from the middle of the crest to the
middle of the trough, and in our American gardening thousands of lawns,
especially small front lawns, are spoiled in their first layout by being
sloped in a single curve instead of in two curves bending opposite
ways.) Along a side of this greensward farthest from the boundary to
which the house is so closely set are the drive and walk, in one, and on
the farther side of these, next the sun, is the main flower-garden, half
surrounding another and smaller piece of lawn. The dwelling stands
endwise to the street and broadside to this expanse of bloom. Against
its front foundations lies a bed of flowering shrubs which at the corner
farthest from the drive swings away along that side's boundary line and
borders it with shrubbery down to the street, the main feature of the
group being a luxuriant flowering quince as large as ten ordinary ones
and in every springtime a red splendor.

But the focus of the gardening s