One of Mrs. Tarryer's Girls with a Weeding Thimble.

Tarryer says Lady Schnipticket showed her the stubs of sixteen checks in one day, all drawn in favor of Scotchmen !

Should the weather prove hot, as was hoped, on account of the late use of muslin dresses in a garden party, the grass plats would not be shady enough for all the performances. "There are plenty of fine plumy trees, M'Tavish, which you can thin out of my planted coppices," said Lady Schnip. Three hundred was the tally cut and stuck in the ground between two days, fit to stand a gale of wind, by a gang of Scotch telegraph-pole operators.

What tickled Uncle Sam and Brother Jonathan was that the party wasn't named till almost the last minute. The name had to grow, as it were. Mrs.

Tarryer generally manages to have a cart-load or two of melons under the well-arbor to quench the thirst of dog-days, and this year the boys made big calculations and had a large piece planted (manure plowed in), and the melons were appling so thick » you could step from one to another. But though they were large, they were later than usual, and it was not known to a certainty whether the bill for melons and moonlight would be full together in September. M'Tavish couldn't tell a ripe melon without plugging it, but he was wise enough not to try. So the date of the show was set only when, from actual inspection by the two veterans and the leading ladies, it was seen, looking at the quirls, scratching the bellies of some, considering the luxuriance of the vines and the state of the weather, that we could certainly pick twenty cartloads of fine melons at the end of a week. Then it was decided to call the affair "A Late Watermelon Party.'* Up to this time our newspaper friends, who were working the thing up, had mentioned it in terms that might mean anything glorious, but now they had full swing to enlarge upon melons.

From private advices concerning the health of a certain eminent official, it was hoped this name would fetch him, but it didn't. He never knew what was good for himself.

Your pages need not be loaded with details, for which the daily press is better fitted. Suffice to say, that the day was splendid - just right in the grass-garden for artificial shade-trees which looked as if they had grown there, and capital, in the grove close by, for the melons and the long tables loaded with flowers and the excellent lunches people brought with them. There were several hundred seats for pairs provided about the grounds, and the truth of history compels me to state that Mrs. Tarryer undertook to teach the Scotchman bow to eat neatly with spoon and fork, from his half of a big melon, on one of them ! She estimates (all flesh is grass) that fifty or sixty safe matches will be made by her "Late Melon Party." But these are only social matters.

From a scientific point of view the gains were large. Nothing tedious was on the program ; everything was spectacular and enlivening. Between the intervals of band-playing from the grand stand, several short papers were read. Miss Laura Schnipticket, a bright young woman of great expectations, at home on her vacation from a medical college, gave an essay "On Certain Glaucous Appearances in Poa trivialis" which was heard with rapt attention by the younger savans.

Some three hundred and fifty select young people, who had learned their parts well, were seated under the shade trees among the grass plats, so that every considerable plat had several people to speak for it. Mrs. Tarryer managed this part of the show herself. A look from her silenced the brass, after a bar or two of "God Save the Queen." She then stated to a hushed audience (I remember hearing a cricket chirp), that through the clumsiness, inefficiency or the craft of teachers, the common people, including nearly everybody, were only learning the nicknames of grass, and she thought it high time we did better than that. Eminent agricultural botanists write of "the well-nigh impossible task of separating Agrostis into its varieties." (Here came groans of derision from all parts of the garden.) "What do you say ?" asked the speaker. "Here are thirty of us distinct varieties of Agrostis without any names, "came back in a roar from the grass-plats.

"Of the Festuca tribes, but little more can be said for the schools," Mrs. Tarryer went on. "What does my garden say ?"

•' Here are twenty more of us beautiful grasses under your noses these thousand years wanting names!" came back in strong young voices which thrilled the audience.

"Now let Festuca ovina rise and speak for herself," when about half an acre of young people began to swing their hats and handkerchiefs from the garden, exclaiming in unison : "We are all as different as can be, full of business, and we want names to carry it on!"

Upon call, Agrostis vulgaris - saucier than Festuca - and several other species were put through the same performance, with even more vehemence and aplomb. This part of the show was singularly effective, because the entire audience of more than fifteen hundred people, including our first citizens, were sitting high up where they could see, plain as a pike-staff, that the scores of plats represented, flat as Turkish rugs on the ground, and more lovely, were strikingly unlike each other. The success was immense and the applause deafening.

"Now," said Mrs. Tarryer, smiling benignantly, "it scarcely need be pointed out to you, that although it may once have been considered good botany and even business - of a doubtful sort - to neglect these most interesting and valuable varieties of perennial forage, it cannot be so any longer. No man - whatever his station - can afford to take agricultural money and shirk the duty or labor of providing these distinct and fixed types of grasses with names fit to pass current everywhere. It would be rank infidel-ilty to the foundation arts of husbandry and the best interests of society to leave our enormous grass industries - in lack of exact names - a prey to quacks and charlatans any longer! You, young men," the speaker said with emphasis, " should see to this matter at once".