man who by some chance--being a
Frenchman--had met and talked with this mother and her husband.

"We made a sad bungle there," said the visitors.

"Do not think it!" he protested. "They are your devoted friends. They
speak of you with the tenderest regard. Moreover, I think they told me
that last year--"

"Yes," rejoined one of the visitors, "last year their garden took one of
the prizes."

THE MIDWINTER GARDENS OF NEW ORLEANS

If the following pages might choose their own time and place they would
meet their reader not in the trolley-car or on the suburban train, but
in his own home, comfortably seated. For in order to justify the
eulogistic tone of the descriptions which must presently occupy them
their first word must be a conciliatory protest against hurry. One
reason we Americans garden so little is that we are so perpetually in
haste. The art of gardening is primarily a leisurely and gentle one.

And gentility still has some rights. Our Louisiana Creoles know this,
and at times maintain it far beyond the pales of their evergreen
gardens.

"'Step lively'?" one of them is said to have amazedly retorted in a New
York street-car. "No, the lady shall not step lively. At yo' leisure,
madame, entrez!" In New Orleans the conductors do not cry "Step lively!"
Right or wrong, the cars there are not absolutely democratic. Gentility
really enjoys in them a certain right to be treated gently.

If democracy could know its own tyrants it would know that one of them
is haste--the haste, the hurry of the crowd; that hurry whose cracking
whip makes every one a compulsory sharer in it. The street-car
conductor, poor lad, is not to blame. The fault is ours, many of us
being in such a scramble to buy democracy at any price that, as if we
were belatedly buying railway tickets, we forget to wait for our change.

Now one of this tyrant's human forms is a man a part of whose tyranny is
to call himself a gardener, though he knows he is not one, and the
symbol of whose oppression is nothing more or less than that germ enemy
of good gardening, the lawn-mower. You, if you know the gardening of our
average American home almost anywhere else, would see, yourself, how
true this is, were you in New Orleans. But you see it beautifully proved
not by the presence but by the absence of the tyranny. The lawn-mower
is there, of course; no one is going to propose that the lawn-mower
anywhere be abolished. It is one of our modern marvel