as we now have it we cannot draw definite conclusions, but
in general it is safe to say that the making of vinegar from Minnesota
apples is done on a close margin. This will mean careful work to get the
most out of the fermentation, the use of yeast, warm cellars or store
rooms and proper management of the casks as to filling and the entrance
of air. The work is not expensive. There is a good demand for really
good vinegar, and a market is provided for fruit which could not readily
be sold in any other form.

A Summer in Our Garden.

MRS. GERTRUDE ELLIS SKINNER, AUSTIN.

Summer in our garden begins with the arrival of the first seed catalogue
in January, and closes the day before its arrival the next January. We
may be short on flowers in our garden, but we are long on seed
catalogues in our library. We do not believe in catalogue houses
excepting seed catalogues. We find them more marvelous than the Arabian
Nights, more imaginative than Baron Manchausen, and more alluring than a
circus poster. We care not who steals the Mona Lisa so long as Salzer
sends us pictures of his cabbages. The art gallery of the Louvre may be
robbed of its masterpiece without awakening a pang in our breasts, if
Dreer will only send us the pictures of those roses that bloom in the
paint-shops of Philadelphia. Morgan may purchase the choicest
collections of paintings in Europe and hide them from the public in his
New York mansion, if May will send us pictures of watermelons, such as
were never imagined by Raphael, Michael Angelo or Correggio.

While the world watches the struggle for the ownership of some great
railway system, the control of some big trust, the development of some
enormous enterprise, we watch for the arrival of the seed catalogue to
see which artist can get the most cabbages in a field, the most melons
on a cart, or make the corn look most like the big trees of Yosemite.
Don't talk to us of the pleasures of bridge whist, it is not to be
compared with the seed catalogue habit.

In the seed catalogue we mark all the things we are going to buy, we
mark all the new things. There is the wonderberry, sweeter than the
blueberry, with the fragrance of the pineapple and the lusciousness of
the strawberry! We mark the Himalaya-berry--which grows thirty feet,
sometimes sixty feet in a single season. Why, one catalogue told of a
man who picked 3,833-1/2 pounds of berries from a single vine, beside
what his children ate. Our H