olers, unable to regard the work as serious, do not hesitate
to interrupt, if nothing more.

Imagine the assurance of the twenty-two-year-old Ponsonby girl, who came
dashing up all of a fume last Saturday morning, when I was comfortably
seated on the old tea tray, transplanting a flat of my best ostrich
plume asters, and begging me, her mother being away, to chaperon her to
a ball game, in a town not far off up the railroad, with harmless,
pink-eyed Teddy Tice, one of her brother's college mates. It seems that
if she could have driven up and taken a groom it would have been good
form, but there was some complication about the horses, and to go by
rail unchaperoned, even though surrounded by a earful of people, was not
to be thought of. I pointed to the asters that must be set out and
covered before the sun was high, but she couldn't understand, and went
off in a huff.

What a disagreeable word chaperon is at best, and what a thankless
vocation the unlisted, active, and very irregular verb 'to chaperon'
implies. I quite agree with Johnson, who denounced the term as affected,
for certainly its application is, though Lavinia Dorman says it is the
natural effect of a definite cause, and that it is quite necessary from
the point of view of the quarter where it most obtains.

Monday morning I was again interrupted in my garden operations by a
Whirlpooler, but the reason was quite different. The twins have gardens
of their own, which are as individual and distinctive as their two
selves. Richard delights in straight rows, well patted down between, and
treats the small seeds that he plants with a sort of paternal patience.
Ian disdains any seed smaller than a nasturtium or bean, whose growth is
soon apparent, and has collected a motley assortment of bulbs, roots, and
plants, without regard to size or season, and bordered his patch with
onion sets for Corney Delaney's express benefit, the goat having a Gallic
taste for highly flavoured morsels. Both boys are fairly patient with
their own gardening operations, but their joy is to "help" me by handing
tools, watering plants, and squirting insecticides, in my society and
under my direction.

Of course I could do it all much quicker by myself, and it has hampered
me this spring, for last season they were too irresponsible to more than
play work a few minutes at a time.

Now I have come to the conclusion that it is their right to learn by
helping me, and that it is the denial of