ity man or a suburban, and it will surely save you from being,
for all the rest of your days, that hideous betwixt-and-between thing,
that uncanny creation of modern days of rapid transit, who fluctuates
helplessly between one town and another; between town and city, and
between town and city again, seeking an impossible and unattainable
perfection, and scattering remonstrant servant-maids and disputed bills
for repairs along his cheerless track.

You have learned that the miseries of country life are not dealt out to
you individually, but that they belong to the life, just as the
troubles you fled from belong to the life of a great city. Of course,
the realization of this fact only serves to make you see that you erred
in making so radical a change in the current of your life. You perceive
only the more clearly that as soon as your appointed time is up, you
must reestablish yourself in urban conditions. There is no question
about it; whatever its merits may be--and you are willing to concede
that they are many--it is obvious that country life does not suit you,
or that you do not suit country life, one or the other. And yet--somehow
incomprehensibly--the understanding that you have only shifted the
burden you bore among your old neighbors has put a strangely new face on
things, and has made you so readily tolerant that you are really a
little surprised at yourself.

[Illustration]

The winter goes by; the ever welcome glory of the spring comes back, and
with it comes the natural human longing to make a garden, which is
really, although we treat it lightly, a sort of humble first-cousin to
the love of children. In your own breast you repress this weakness. Why
taste of a pleasure which in another short year you mean to put
permanently out of your reach? But there is no resisting the entreaties
of your children, nor your wife's ready interest in their schemes, and
you send for Pat Brannigan, and order a garden made. Of course, it is
only for the children, but it is strange how readily a desire to please
the little ones spreads into a broader benevolence. When you look over
your wife's list of plants and seeds, you are surprised to find how many
of them are perennials. "They will please the next tenants here," says
your wife; "think how nice it would have been for us to find some
flowers all already for us, when we came here!" This may possibly lead
you to reflecting that there might have been something, after all, in