y devoted at the very time that you wrote me?

Augur holes could be bored in them at various distances and angles, if
not too acute; the thing was to find glass, in bottle or other forms, to
fit in the openings. This difficulty was solved by _The Man from
Everywhere_ on his reappearance the night before the Fourth, after an
absence of a whole week, laden with every manner of noise and fire
making arrangement for the Infant, though I presently found that Bart
had partly instigated the outfit, and the two overgrown boys revelled in
fire-balloons and rockets under cover of the Infant's enthusiasm, much
as the grandpa goes to the circus as an apparent martyr to little
Tommy's desire! A large package that, from the extreme care of its
handling, I judged must hold something highly explosive, on being opened
divulged many dozens of the slender glass tubes, with a slight lip for
holding cord or wire, such as, filled with roses or orchids, are hung in
the garlands of asparagus vines and smilax in floral decorations of
either houses or florists' windows. These tubes varied in length from
four to six inches, the larger being three inches in diameter.

"Behold your leak-proof interiors!" he cried, holding one up. "Now set
your wits and Bart's tool-box to work and we shall have some speedy
results!"

Dear _Man from Everywhere_, he had bought a gross of the glasses,
thereby reminding me of a generous but eccentric great-uncle of ours who
had a passion for attending auctions, and once, by error, in buying, as
he supposed, twelve yellow earthenware bowls, found himself confronted
by twelve _dozen_. Thus grandmother's storeroom literally had a golden
lining, and my entire childhood was pervaded with these bowls, several
finally falling into my possession for the mixing of mud pies! But
between the durability of yellow bowls and blown-glass tubes there is
little parallel, and already I have found the advantage of having a good
supply in stock.

Our first natural flower-holder is a great success. Having found a
four-pronged silver birch, with a broken top, over in the abandoned
gravel-pit (where, by the way, are a score of others to be had for the
digging, and such easy digging too), Larry sawed it off a bit below the
ground, so as to give it an even base. The diameter of the four uprights
was not quite a foot, all told, and these were sawn of unequal lengths
of four, six, seven, and nine inches, care being taken not to "haggle,"
as L