t sight is thrilling, nay, lyric! I
have always found that the measure of a man's (and more especially a
woman's) garden love was to be found in his (or her) attitude toward
the manure pile. For that reason I put the manure pile in the first
paragraph of my praise of gardens in the spring.

That yellowish-brown, steaming volcano above the slushy snow of March
promises so much! I will not offend sensitive garden owners who hire
others to do their dirty work, by singing the joy of turning it over
with a fork, once, twice, perhaps three times, till it is "working"
evenly all through. Yet there is such joy, accentuated on the second
day by the fact that the thermometer has taken a sudden jump upwards,
the snow is melting fast, and in the shrubs and evergreen hedge the
song-sparrows are singing, and the robins. Last year, I remember, I
paused with the steaming pile half turned, first to roll up my sleeves
and feel the warm sun on my arms--most delicious of early spring
sensations--and then to listen to the love-call of a chickadee, over
and over the three notes, one long and two short a whole tone lower. I
answered him, he replied, and we played our little game for two or
three minutes, till he came close and detected the fraud. Then a
bluebird flashed through the orchard, a jay screamed, as I bent to my
toil again. Beside me were the hotbed frames, the glasses newly
washed, the winter bedding of leaves removed, and behind them last
year's contents rotted into rich loam. Another day or two, and they
would be prepared for seeding--if I only could bring myself to work
hard enough until then!

How much hope goes into a hotbed in late March, or early April! How
much warmth the friendly manure down under the soil sends up by night
to germinate the seeds, though the weather go back to winter
outside--as it invariably does in our mountains! Last year, for
example, we had snow on the ninth of April, and again on the
twenty-third and twenty-ninth, while the year before, on the ninth,
six inches fell. In the lowland regions gardening is easier, perhaps,
but yet there is a certain joy in this fickle spring weather of
ours,--the joy of going out in the morning across a white garden and
sweeping the snow from hotbed mats, lifting the moist, steaming glass,
and catching from within, strong against your face, the pungent warmth
and aroma of the heated soil and the delicate fragrance of young
seedlings. How fast the seeds come--some of th