very reasonable desire to make the small home lot look as large as
possible, down come the fences, side and front, and the applauding
specialist of the lawn-mower begs that those obstructions may never be
set up again, because now the householder can have his lawn mowed so
much _quicker_, and he, the pusher, can serve more customers. Were he
truly a gardener he might know somewhat of the sweet, sunlit, zephyrous,
fragrant outdoor privacies possible to a real garden, and more or less
of that benign art which, by skilful shrubbery plantings, can make a
small place look much larger--as well as incomparably more
interesting--than can any mere abolition of fences, and particularly of
the street fence. But he has not so much as one eye of a genuine
gardener or he would know that he is not keeping your lawn but only
keeping it shaven. He is not even a good garden laborer. You might as
well ask him how to know the wild flowers as how to know the lawn
pests--dandelion, chickweed, summer-grass, heal-all, moneywort and the
like--with which you must reckon wearily by and by because he only mows
them in his blindness and lets them flatten to the ground and scatter
their seed like an infantry firing-line. Inquire of him concerning any
one of the few orphan shrubs he has permitted you to set where he least
dislikes them, and which he has trimmed clear of the sod--put into short
skirts--so that he may run his whirling razors under (and now and then
against) them at full speed. Will he know the smallest fact about it or
yield any echo of your interest in it?

There is a late story of an aged mother, in a darkened room, saying
falteringly to the kind son who has brought in some flowers which she
caresses with her soft touch, "I was wishing to-day--We used to have
them in the yard--before the lawn-mower--" and saying no more. I know it
for a fact, that in a certain cemetery the "Sons of the American
Revolution" have for years been prevented from setting up their modest
marks of commemoration upon the graves of Revolutionary heroes, because
they would be in the way of the sexton's lawn-mower.

Now in New Orleans the case is so different that really the amateur
gardener elsewhere has not all his rights until he knows why it is so
different. Let us, therefore, look into it. In that city one day the
present writer accosted an Irishman who stood, pruning-shears in hand,
at the foot of Clay's statue, Lafayette Square. It was the first week of