Stories to Tell Children Part 20

The man harnessed the horses to it, and then he stood on the platform and drove all over the strip of land. It was fun to watch, but perhaps it was a little hard to do. The man's weight kept the harrow steady, and let the teeth of the rake scratch and cut the ground up, so that it did not stay in ridges.

"He scrambles the ground, father!" said Margery.

"It needs 'scrambling,'" laughed her father. "We are going to get more weeds than we want on this fresh soil, and the more the ground is broken, the fewer there will be."

[Ill.u.s.tration]

After the ploughing and harrowing, the man drove off, and Margery's father said that he himself would do the rest of the work in the late afternoons, when he came home from business; they could not afford too much help, he said, and he had learned to take care of a garden when he was a boy. So Margery did not see any more done until the next day.

But the next day there was hard work for Margery's father! Every bit of that ground had to be broken up still more with a spade, and then the clods which were full of gra.s.s-roots had to be taken on a fork and shaken, till the earth fell out; when the gra.s.s was thrown to one side.

That would not have had to be done if the land had been ploughed in the autumn; the gra.s.s would have rotted in the ground, and would have made food for the plants. Now, Margery's father put the fertiliser on the top, and then raked it into the earth.

At last, it was time to make the place for the seeds. Margery and her mother helped. Father tied one end of a cord to a little stake, and drove the stake in the ground at one end of the garden. Then he took the cord to the other end of the garden and pulled it tight, tied it to another stake, and drove that down. That made a straight line. Then he hoed a trench, a few inches deep, the whole length of the cord, and scattered fertiliser in it. Pretty soon the whole garden was lined with little trenches.

"Now for the seed," said father.

Margery ran and brought the seed box. "May I help?" she asked.

"If you watch me sow one row, I think you can do the next," said her father.

So Margery watched. Her father took a handful of peas, and, stooping, walked slowly along the line, letting the seed trickle through his fingers. It was pretty to watch; it made Margery think of a photograph her teacher had, a photograph of a famous picture called "The Sower."

Perhaps you have seen it.

Putting in the seed was not so easy to do as to watch; sometimes Margery dropped in too much, and sometimes not enough; but her father was patient with her, and soon she did better.

They planted peas, beans, spinach, carrots, and parsnips. And Margery's father made a row of holes, after that, for the tomato plants. He said those had to be transplanted; they could not be sown from seed.

When the seeds were in the trenches they had to be covered up, and Margery really helped at that. It is fun to do it. You stand beside the little trench and walk backward, and as you walk you hoe the loose earth back over the seeds; the same earth that was hoed up you pull back again. Then you rake very gently over the surface, with the back of a rake, to even it all off. Margery liked it, because now the garden began to look _like_ a garden.

But best of all was the work next day, when her own little particular garden was begun. Father Brown loved Margery and Margery's mother so much that he wanted their garden to be perfect, and that meant a great deal more work. He knew very well that the old gra.s.s would begin to come through again on such soil, and that it would make terribly hard weeding. He was not going to have any such thing for his two "little girls," as he called them. So he gave that little garden particular attention. This is what he did.

After he had thrown out all the turf, he shovelled clean earth on to the garden,--as much as three solid inches of it; not a bit of gra.s.s was in that. Then it was ready for raking and fertilising, and for the lines.

The little footpaths were marked out by Father Brown's feet; Margery and her mother laughed well at his actions, for it looked like some kind of dance. Mr Brown had seen gardeners do it when he was a little boy, and he did it very nicely: he walked along the sides of the square, with one foot turned a little out, and the other straight, taking such tiny steps that his feet touched each other all the time. This tramped out a path just wide enough for a person to walk.

The wider path was marked with lines and raked.

Margery thought, of course, all the flowers would be put in as the vegetables were; but she found that it was not so. For some, her father poked little holes with his finger; for some, he made very shallow trenches; and some very small seeds were scattered lightly over the top of the ground.

Margery and her mother had taken so much pains in thinking out the arrangement of the flowers, that perhaps you will like to hear just how they designed that garden. At the back were the sweet peas, which would grow tall, like a screen; on the two sides, for a kind of hedge, were yellow sunflowers; and along the front edge were the gay nasturtiums.

Margery planned that, so that she could look into the garden from the front, but have it shut away from the vegetable patch by the tall flowers on the sides. The two front corners had canariensis in them.

Canariensis is a pretty creeper with golden blossoms, very dainty and bright. And then, in little square patches all round the garden, were planted London pride, blue bachelor's b.u.t.tons, yellow marigolds, tall larkspur, many-coloured asters, hollyhocks and stocks. All these lovely flowers used to grow in our grandmothers' gardens, and if you don't know what they look like, I hope you can find out next summer.

Between the flowers and the middle path went the seeds for that wonderful salad garden; all the things Mrs Brown had named to Margery were there. Margery had never seen anything more wonderful than the little round lettuce-seeds. They were so tiny that it did not seem possible that green lettuce leaves could come from them. But they surely would.

Mother and father and Margery were late to supper that evening. But they were all so happy that it did not matter. The last thing Margery thought of, as she went to sleep at night, was the dear, smooth little garden, with its funny footpath, and with the little sticks standing at the ends of the rows, labelled "lettuce," "beets," "helianthus," and so on.

"I have a garden! I have a garden!" was Margery's last thought as she went off to dreamland.

FOOTNOTES:

[26] I have always been inclined to avoid, in my work among children, the "how to make" and "how to do" kind of story; it is too likely to trespa.s.s on the ground belonging by right to its more artistic and less intentional kinsfolk. Nevertheless, there is a legitimate place for the instruction-story. Within its own limits, and especially in a school use, it has a real purpose to serve, and a real desire to meet. Children have a genuine taste for such morsels of practical information, if the bites are not made too big and too solid. And to the elementary teacher, from whom so much is demanded in the way of practical instruction, I know that these stories are a boon. They must be chosen with care, and used with discretion, but they need never be ignored.

I venture to give some little stories of this type, which I hope may be of use in the schools where country life and country work is an unknown experience to the children.

THE LITTLE COTYLEDONS

This is another story about Margery's garden.

The next morning after the garden was planted, Margery was up and out at six o'clock. She could not wait to look at her garden. To be sure, she knew that the seeds could not sprout in a single night, but she had a feeling that _something_ might happen at any moment. The garden was just as smooth and brown as the night before, and no little seedlings were in sight.

But a very few mornings after that, when Margery went out, she saw a funny little crack opening up through the earth, the whole length of the patch. Quickly she knelt down on the footpath, to see. Yes! Tiny green leaves, a whole row of them, were pus.h.i.+ng their way through the crust!

Margery knew what she had put there: it was the radish-row; these must be radish leaves. She examined them very closely, so that she might know a radish next time. The little leaves, no bigger than half your little-finger nail, grew in twos,--two on each tiny stem; they were almost round.

Margery flew back to her mother, to say that the first seeds were up.

And her mother, nearly as excited as Margery, came to look at the little crack.

Each day, after that, the row of radishes grew, till, in a week, it stood as high as your finger, green and st.u.r.dy. But about the third day, while Margery was stooping over the radishes, she saw something very, very small and green, peeping above ground, where the lettuce was planted. Could it be weeds? No, for on looking very closely she saw that the wee leaves faintly marked a regular row. They did not make a crack, like the radishes; they seemed too small and too far apart to push the earth up like that. Margery leaned down and looked with all her eyes at the baby plants. The tiny leaves grew two on a stem, and were almost round. The more she looked at them the more it seemed to Margery that they looked exactly as the radish looked when it first came up. "Do you suppose," Margery said to herself, "that lettuce and radish look alike while they are growing? They don't look alike when they are on the table!"

Day by day the lettuce grew, and soon the little round leaves were easier to examine; they certainly were very much like radish leaves.

Then, one morning, while she was searching for signs of other seeds, Margery discovered the beets. In irregular patches on the row, hints of green were coming. The next day and the next they grew, until the beet leaves were big enough to see.

Margery looked. Then she looked again. Then she wrinkled her forehead.

"Can we have made a mistake?" she thought. "Do you suppose we can have planted _all_ radishes?"

For those little beet leaves were almost round, and they grew two on a stem, precisely like the lettuce and the radish; except for the size, all three rows looked alike.

It was too much for Margery. She ran to the house and found her father.

Her little face was so anxious that he thought something unpleasant had happened. "Papa," she said, all out of breath, "do you think we could have made a mistake about my garden? Do you think we could have put radishes in all the rows?"

Father laughed. "What makes you think such a thing?" he asked.

"Papa," said Margery, "the little leaves all look exactly alike! every plant has just two tiny leaves on it, and shaped the same; they are roundish, and grow out of the stem at the same place."

Papa's eyes began to twinkle. "Many of the dicotyledonous plants look alike at the beginning," he said, with a little drawl on the big word.

That was to tease Margery, because she always wanted to know the big words she heard.

"What's 'dicotyledonous'?" said Margery, carefully.

"Wait till I come home to-night, dear," said her father, "and I'll tell you."

That evening Margery was waiting eagerly for him. When her father finished his supper they went together to the garden, and father examined the seedlings carefully. Then he pulled up a little radish plant and a tiny beet.

"These little leaves," he said, "are not the real leaves of the plant; they are only little pockets to hold food for the plant to live on till it gets strong enough to push up into the air. As soon as the real leaves come out and begin to draw food from the air, these little subst.i.tutes wither up and fall off. These two lie folded up in the little seed from the beginning, and are full of plant food. They don't have to be very special in shape, you see, because they don't stay on the plant after it is grown up."