em! Others come so
slowly that the amateur gardener is in despair, and angrily decides to
try a new seed house next year. The vegetable frames are sown in
rows--celery, tomatoes, cauliflowers, lettuce, radishes, peppers,
coming up in tiny green ribbons, the radishes racing ahead. The flower
frames, however, are sown in squares, each about a foot across, and
each labeled and marked off with a thin strip of wood. These are the
early plantings of the annuals, for we cannot sow out-of-doors till
the first or even the second week in May in our climate. Sometimes,
indeed, we do not dare to sow even in the frames till well into April.
The asters are usually up first, racing the weeds. The little squares
make, in a week or so, a green checker-board, each promising its quota
of color to the garden, and very soon the early cosmos, thinned to the
strongest plants, has shot up like a miniature forest, towering over
the lowlier seedlings, sometimes bumping its head against the glass
before it can be transplanted to the open ground in May. But most
prolific, most promising, and most bothersome, are the squares labeled
"antirrhinum," coral red, salmon pink, white, dark maroon, and so on;
tiny seeds scattered on the ground and sprinkled with a little sand,
they come up by the hundred, and each seedling has to go into a pot
before it goes into the ground.

There is work for an April day! I sit on a board by the hotbed,
cross-legged like a Turk, while the sun is warm on my neck and I feel
my arms tanning, and removing a mass of the seedlings on a flat
mason's trowel, I lift each strong plant between thumb and finger, its
long, delicate white root dangling like a needle, and pot it in a
small paper pot. When two score pots are ready, I set them in a
cold-frame, sprinkle them, stretch the kink out of my back, listen to
the wood-thrush a moment (he came on the fourteenth and is evidently
planning to nest in our pines), and then return to my job. Patience is
required to pot four or five hundred snapdragons; but patience is
required, after all, in most things that are rightly performed. I
think as I work of the glory around my sundial in July, I arrange and
rearrange the colors in my mind--and presently the job is done.

But the steaming manure pile is not the only sign of spring, nor the
hotbeds the only things to be attended to. If they only were, how
much easier gardening would be--and how much less exciting! There is
always work to be d