ker with priests in the train.

THE AMATEUR GARDENER

The first step in amateur gardening is to sit down and consider what
good you are going to get by it. If you are only a tenant by the month,
as most people are, it is obviously not of much use for you to plant a
fruit orchard or an avenue of oak trees. What you want is something that
will grow quickly, and will stand transplanting, for when you move it
would be a sin to leave behind you the plants on which you have spent so
much labour and so much patent manure.

We knew a man once who was a bookmaker by trade--and a Leger bookmaker
at that--but had a passion for horses and flowers. When he "had a big
win", as he occasionally did, it was his custom to have movable wooden
stables, built on skids, put up in the yard, and to have tons of the
best soil that money could buy carted into the garden of the premises
which he was occupying.

Then he would keep splendid horses, and grow rare roses and show-bench
chrysanthemums. His landlord passing by would see the garden in a
blaze of colour, and promise himself to raise the bookmaker's rent next
quarter day.

However, when the bookmaker "took the knock", as he invariably did at
least twice a year, it was his pleasing custom to move without giving
notice. He would hitch two cart-horses to the stables, and haul them
right away at night. He would not only dig up the roses, trees, and
chrysanthemums he had planted, but would also cart away the soil he
had brought in; in fact, he used to shift the garden bodily. He had one
garden that he shifted to nearly every suburb in Sydney; and he always
argued that the change of air was invaluable for chrysanthemums.

Being determined, then, to go in for gardening on common-sense
principles, and having decided on the shrubs you mean to grow, the next
consideration is your chance of growing them.

If your neighbour keeps game fowls, it may be taken for granted that
before long they will pay you a visit, and you will see the rooster
scratching your pot plants out by the roots as if they were so much
straw, just to make a nice place to lie down and fluff the dust over
himself. Goats will also stray in from the street, and bite the young
shoots off, selecting the most valuable plants with a discrimination
that would do credit to a professional gardener.

It is therefore useless to think of growing delicate or squeamish
plants. Most amateur gardeners maintain a lifelong struggle