ion more than
compensating for any sacrifices he may have made.

No one doubts that it _is_ a sacrifice to give up a lesser pleasure even
to gain the "summum bonum" and that it _does_ take will power to keep
oneself from weakly saying in the face of temptation, "Oh, well! what
does it matter! My little house would perhaps be better without that,
but I have grown accustomed to it, let it stay!"

Such weakness is fatal in a tiny house.
But how much more fatal in a tiny garden!

Oh! the waste lands which lie beneath the sun trying to call themselves
gardens! Oh! the pitiful little plots, unfenced, unused, entirely
misunderstood by people who stick houses in the middle of them and call
them "gardens"!

No amount of good grass seed, or expensive planting, or well-cared-for
flowers and lawns will ever make the average suburban lot anything but a
"lot," and most of them might as well, or _better_, be rough,
uncultivated fields for all the relation they bear to the houses upon
them or the use they were intended for.

It is to be supposed that when a man gives up the comforts of town
apartments and hies him to the country, it is the garden, the outdoors,
which lures him.

Why is it, then, that he seems to take particular pains to arrange his
garden so that it is about as much his own as Central Park is?

It might give the average man a great deal of pleasure to be able to say
to all the passersby on the Mall, "This little bit of the Park belongs
to me! I cut that grass, I weed those flower beds in the evening when I
come home from the office; and every Saturday afternoon I take the hose
and thoroughly soak that bit of lawn there, you may see me at it any
week in the summer."

But then, we are not dealing with the fictitious average man, and we
firmly believe that many "commuters" wonder deep down in their hearts
why it is they get from their gardens so little of the pleasure they
anticipated when they came to live out of the city.

Any one who has traveled abroad, has admired and perhaps coveted the
gardens of England, France, and Italy. Their charm is undeniable, and
thought to be too elusive for reproduction on American soil without the
aid of landscape gardeners and a fair-sized fortune.

Just why we, as a nation, are beset by the idea of reproducing instead
of originating beautiful gardens is a question apart from this
discussion. But as soon as we try to develop, to their fullest extent,
the adv