hristmas card, and
remembering the drabble and jangle of the town, we were not sorry to be
among the clean white hills.

III

_No animal except man digs and plants_

It was only a little after Christmas that we began planning for our
spring garden. As commuters, we had once possessed a garden--a bit of
ground, thirty-five feet square, but fruitful beyond belief. Now we had
broad, enriched spaces that in our fancy we saw luxuriant with vegetable
and bright with flower.

I suppose one of the most deeply seated of human instincts is to plant
and till the soil. It is the thing that separates us most widely from
other animal life. The beasts and birds and insects build houses, lay up
food, and some of them, even if unwittingly, change the style of their
clothing with the seasons. But no animal except man digs and plants and
cultivates the flower and fruit and vegetable that nourish his body and
soul. It is something that must date back to creation, for in the
deepest winter, when the ground is petrified and the skies are low and
gray, the very thought of turning up the earth, and raking and planting,
awakens a thrill in the innermost recesses of the normal human heart,
while a new seed-catalogue, filled with gay pictures and gaudy promises,
becomes a poem, nothing less.

What gardens we anticipate when the snow lies deep and we pore over
those seductive lists by a blazing fire! Never a garden this side of
Paradise so fair as they. For there are no weeds in our gardens of
anticipation, nor pests, nor drought, nor any blight. The sun always
shines there, and purple flowers are waving in the wind. No real garden
will ever be so beautiful, because it will never quite be bathed in the
tender light, never wave with quite the loveliness of those fair, frail
gardens of our dreams.

We planted many dream gardens that winter. Splendid catalogues came
every little while, and each had its magic of color and special
offers--"Six rare roses for a dollar," "Six papers of seeds for ten
cents"--six of anything to make the heart happy, for a ridiculously
small sum. The rich level behind the barn was to us no longer hard with
frost and buried beneath the drifts, but green and waving. Some days we
walked out to look over the ground a little and pick the places where we
would have things, but our imagination seemed to work better in the
house by the big fireplace, especially when we rattled the
buff-and-green seed-packets that presentl