unger than we are.
Tell that to Mrs. Borgia; it will reconcile her."

A lusty uproar made itself heard upstairs and Titania gave a little
scream. "Heavens!" she cried. "Here I am talking with you and Junior's
bottle is half an hour late. I don't care what Mr. Wilson does to the
clocks; he won't be able to fool Junior. He knows when it's, time for
meals. Won't you call up Central and find out the exact time?"

A TRAGIC SMELL IN MARATHON

Marathon, Pa., April 2.

This is a very embarrassing time of year for us. Every morning when we
get on the 8:13 train at Marathon Bill Stites or Fred Myers or Hank
Harris or some other groundsel philosopher on the Cinder and Bloodshot
begins to chivvy us about our garden. "Have you planted anything yet?"
they say. "Have you put litmus paper in the soil to test it for lime,
potash and phosphorus? Have you got a harrow?"

That sort of thing bothers us, because our ideas of cultivation are very
primitive. We did go to the newsstand at the Reading Terminal and try to
buy a Litmus paper, but the agent didn't have any. He says he doesn't
carry the Jersey papers. So we buried some old copies of the
_Philistine_ in the garden, thinking that would strengthen up the soil a
bit. This business of nourishing the soil seems grotesque. It's hard
enough to feed the family, let alone throwing away good money on feeding
the land. Our idea about soil is that it ought to feed itself.

Our garden ought to be lusty enough to raise the few beans and beets
and blisters we aspire to. We have been out looking at the soil. It
looks fairly potent and certainly it goes a long way down. There are
quite a lot of broken magnesia bottles and old shinbones scattered
through it, and they ought to help along. The topsoil and the humus may
be a little mixed, but we are not going to sort them out by hand.

Our method is to go out at twilight the first Sunday in April, about the
time the cutworms go to roost, and take a sharp-pointed stick. We draw
lines in the ground with this stick, preferably in a pleasant
geometrical pattern that will confuse the birds and other observers. It
is important not to do this until twilight, so that no robins or insects
can watch you. Then we go back in the house and put on our old trousers,
the pair that has holes in each pocket. We fill the pockets with the
seed, we want to plant and loiter slowly along the grooves we have made
in the earth. The seed sifts down the trousers leg