"OVERHANG THE REAR WALK WITH VISTAS OF FOLIAGE" corners of the house with motherwort and other pleasant weeds. You will round off the corners with billows of trumpetcreeper. You will overhang the rear walk with vistas of foliage. You will scatter bright flowers in the border by the kitchen window. A garden or a plant is valuable for the place it occupies as well as for itself. There is satisfaction in the yard in which all parts blend and harmonize; it has character as a whole and as a picture. It has meaning. A yard that has individual plants scattered over it hails you as you pass; and each plant shouts, "See! I cost five dollars!" Yet, with all this, who is not drawn to the neglected garden? What are the oldfashioned gardens that we love, if they do not have an old-time air of abandon and unrestraint? There is one that I visit often. It is one of the estates of a past generation, built when land was cheap. It has seen its day. Now there are rotting piles of wood grown over with moss and the weedy tangles of bittersweet. Old trees have fallen, and unfamiliar plants are growing about their pros trate trunks. In these early days of May the new grass is soft and thick. The old sod springs under your feet. A full coinage of dandelions is scattered on the grass. You scrooch under the broken trees and pick your way through thickets of plumsprouts and lilac. Old-fashioned daffodils and jonquils and grape-hyacinths rise from the grass and mark the sites of former beds which in their prime had trim borders of flagstone or of box. In the open places are soft cushions of celandine, catnip, motherwort, and bluebells. Shyfaced sweet violets hide themselves in the deep turf. The wide spears of tulips are springing along the old walks, and amongst them the wild cleavers are clambering for sunlight. A wide-spreading clump of striped canary-grass marks the spot of some old flower-bed. From front to rear at one side of the place stretches the ruin of a promenade. A generation since a summer-house stood at its further end; the broken weather-gray lattice marks its place. The box-edging, in a The box-edging, in a double broken windrow, alone recalls the formal beauty of the design. Into the edging the plum-sprouts have intruded, and daffodils and crown imperials have worked their way into the nooks and spaces. Here one can botanize. Here the wild birds nest; and in the season one may hear the warblers as they stop in their long migrations, for the birds seem to have an instinct that leads them to neglected gardens. But these old gardens interest us because of the memories that they recall, not alone because they are gardens. They are suggestive of human lives. Yet I fancy that more than one human being has been led to a love of plants from having first known them in some grandmother's garden. We would not make at neglected garden, for intentional neglect is not neglect of the neglectful kind; but neglect that comes naturally and easily will be no indication of failure if only we find satisfaction in the decline; and hereby am I the more willing to urge every one to make a garden! A garden in which one finds joy cannot be successless. There is no weather that does not suit some plant. In the hottest and driest time the portulacas are burning red on the sand. In cool and cloudy weather the soft morning-glories remain open until noon. When the soil is soaked with rain, the irises are in their glory. The plants have no dread of storm. Note the hang of the leaves and the droop of the flowers in the beating rain. Note that the chickens do not run, but throw their bodies back to shed the rain and then stand in philosophic comfort. Thoreau was glad when it rained because his beans were happy. A garden is the best of remedies for that commonest of melancholies, the habit of grumbling at the weather. Your chief joy in your garden will not be in the vegetables that you eat nor in the flowers that you pick, but in the satisfaction of causing things to grow. You will enjoy the companionship of things that are real and clean. You will come to know the common and the little things. Some time, without knowing it, you will let a pigweed grow; and then you will be sorry to pull it up. An Autobiography BY JACOB A. RIIS Author of -How the Other Haif Lives" "A Ten Years' War," etc.. etc. Chapter VII.-Elisabeth Tells Her ber often saying to my aunt, whom, by H Story TOW well I remember the days of which my husband has writtenour childhood in the old Danish town where to this day, in spite of my love for America, the air seems fresher, the meadows greener, the sea more blue, and where above it all the skylark sings his song clearer, softer, and sweeter than anywhere else in the world! I-it is too bad that we cannot tell our own stories without all the time talking about our selves, but it is so and there is no help for it. Well, then, I was a happy little girl in those days. Though my own father, a country lawyer, had died early and left my dear mother without any means of support for herself and three children except what she earned herself by teach ing school and music, it did not make life harder for me, for I had been since I was three years old with mother's young est and loveliest sister and her husband. They were rich and prosperous. They brought me up as their own, and never had a child a kinder father and mother or a more beautiful home than I had with my uncle and aunt. Besides, I was naturally a happy child. Life seemed full of sunshine, and every day dawned with promise of joy and pleasure. I remem Copyright, 1901, the Outlook Company. the way, I called mother, "I am so happy I don't know what to do!" So I skipped and danced about among the lumber in the sight of Jacob Riis, till, in sheer amazement, he cut his finger off. He says admiration, not amazement, but I have my own ideas about that. I see him yet with his arm in a sling and a defiant look, making his way across the hall at dancing-school to engage me as his partner. I did not appreciate the compliment in the least, for I would a good deal rather have had Charles, who danced well and was a much nicerlooking boy. Besides, Charles's sister Valgerda had told me in confidence how Jacob had said to Charles that he would marry me when I was a woman, or die. And was there ever such assurance? From the day I learned of this, I treated Jacob with all the coolness and contempt of which my naturally kindly disposition was capable. When he spoke to me I answered him hardly a word, and took pains to show my preference for Charles or some other boy. But it seemed to make no difference to him. I was just seventeen when I received the first love-letter from Jacob. Like the dutiful fellow he was, he sent it through his mother to my mother, who read it before giving it to me. She handed it to me with the words: "I need not tell you |