one may not
learn from this little book either divinity or horticulture; but if he
gets a pure happiness, and a tendency to repeat the happiness from the
simple stores of Nature, he will gain from our friend's garden what Adam
lost in his, and what neither philosophy nor divinity has always been
able to restore.

Wherefore, thanking you for listening to a former letter, which begged
you to consider whether these curious and ingenious papers, that go
winding about like a half-trodden path between the garden and the field,
might not be given in book-form to your million readers, I remain, yours
to command in everything but the writing of an Introduction,

HENRY WARD BEECHER.

BY WAY OF DEDICATION

MY DEAR POLLY,--When a few of these papers had appeared in "The
Courant," I was encouraged to continue them by hearing that they had at
least one reader who read them with the serious mind from which alone
profit is to be expected. It was a maiden lady, who, I am sure, was no
more to blame for her singleness than for her age; and she looked to
these honest sketches of experience for that aid which the professional
agricultural papers could not give in the management of the little bit
of garden which she called her own. She may have been my only disciple;
and I confess that the thought of her yielding a simple faith to what a
gainsaying world may have regarded with levity has contributed much
to give an increased practical turn to my reports of what I know about
gardening. The thought that I had misled a lady, whose age is not her
only singularity, who looked to me for advice which should be not at all
the fanciful product of the Garden of Gull, would give me great pain. I
trust that her autumn is a peaceful one, and undisturbed by either the
humorous or the satirical side of Nature.

You know that this attempt to tell the truth about one of the most
fascinating occupations in the world has not been without its dangers. I
have received anonymous letters. Some of them were murderously spelled;
others were missives in such elegant phrase and dress, that danger
was only to be apprehended in them by one skilled in the mysteries of
medieval poisoning, when death flew on the wings of a perfume. One lady,
whose entreaty that I should pause had something of command in it, wrote
that my strictures on "pusley" had so inflamed her husband's zeal,
that, in her absence in the country, he had rooted up all her beds of
portulaca (