follow about
a person who told them stories, and interested them with his charming
talk, as greedily as if his pockets had been full of bon-bons.

Perhaps this fact has no practical relation to gardening; but it occurs
to me that, if I should paper the outside of my high board fence with
the leaves of "The Arabian Nights," it would afford me a good deal of
protection,--more, in fact, than spikes in the top, which tear trousers
and encourage profanity, but do not save much fruit. A spiked fence is
a challenge to any boy of spirit. But if the fence were papered with
fairy-tales, would he not stop to read them until it was too late for
him to climb into the garden? I don't know. Human nature is vicious. The
boy might regard the picture of the garden of the Hesperides only as
an advertisement of what was over the fence. I begin to find that the
problem of raising fruit is nothing to that of getting it after it has
matured. So long as the law, just in many respects, is in force against
shooting birds and small boys, the gardener may sow in tears and reap in
vain.

The power of a boy is, to me, something fearful. Consider what he can
do. You buy and set out a choice pear-tree; you enrich the earth for
it; you train and trim it, and vanquish the borer, and watch its slow
growth. At length it rewards your care by producing two or three pears,
which you cut up and divide in the family, declaring the flavor of the
bit you eat to be something extraordinary. The next year, the little
tree blossoms full, and sets well; and in the autumn has on its slender,
drooping limbs half a bushel of fruit, daily growing more delicious in
the sun. You show it to your friends, reading to them the French name,
which you can never remember, on the label; and you take an honest pride
in the successful fruit of long care. That night your pears shall be
required of you by a boy! Along comes an irresponsible urchin, who has
not been growing much longer than the tree, with not twenty-five cents
worth of clothing on him, and in five minutes takes off every pear, and
retires into safe obscurity. In five minutes the remorseless boy has
undone your work of years, and with the easy nonchalance, I doubt not,
of any agent of fate, in whose path nothing is sacred or safe.

And it is not of much consequence. The boy goes on his way,--to
Congress, or to State Prison: in either place he will be accused of
stealing, perhaps wrongfully. You learn, in time, that i