The rigors of winter teach us appreciation of the summer, and its rest should renew us for the activities of another garden year. Of all men in business, the cultivator has most opportunity of change and respite. As often as season rolls into season or day closes into night he finds variation of occupation and new direction for thought, and the longer recreation of the winter affords opportunity of balancing the outcomes of the year. Into its leisure is brought the success and the failure, and out of it goes energy and hope. This vacation time of the planter is nature's seal to the greatness of his calling, her demand of preparation for a multitude of various endeavors. Land and plants alone are idle; the planter still must grow. The farmer is everywhere more important than the farm. It is the ■ farmer who must widen and ennoble farming.

So the winter becomes the farmer's opportunity. Here the success or the failure of the coming year is born. It is not strange that there is so little success in tilling the soil. Three or four months of intellectual emptiness cannot be expected to produce crops of success. The wonder is that failure is not commoner. A vocation widest in its requirements receives least in preparation for it, and yet most is demanded from it. If respite of winter means anything to the planter, it means greater success and deeper pleasure in the days to come. The garden year should begin with the first days of January rather than with the warming days of April. It should begin in the coolness and candor of leisure hours, and its stimulus should be determination rather than enthusiasm. Gardens fail when planned in the bursting days of spring. Haste and restlessness wither with the drouths of July.

Each year widens the scope of gardening. Markets change, soils deteriorate, varieties grow old, insect and plant diseases increase, and everywhere and at all times men are finding out something new. Into this world of activity the gardener comes, and he must strike into it courageously or fall in with laggards. The time has long since passed when rule of thumb can earn a living. Each year the garden must be planned more thoroughly, and the planning must be an outgrowth of continued thought. Thoroughness of planning always begets ambition and enthusiasm. The growth of plants and the pleasures of the fields become attractive as we think of them and plan for them.

The materials of fireside gardening are now-adays abundant. Read any of the recent books on out-door life, and you will wonder how you could have lost so much of the happiness which is within reach of you. The first essential to pleasant farm life is contentment on the farm, and no agent so quickly touches and refines the thoughful mind as pleasant books of fields and woods. Yet, in their way, the seedsmen's catalogues of recent years are scarcely less entertaining. All that is attractive in vegetation finds record and illustration here, and one becomes impatient of the dragging weeks that he may again plant and till. With all their faults it is no doubt true that these catalogues have stimulated much of the recent activity of gardening. They are monuments of the advertiser's skill. Someone has called them the "mile-posts of horticulture," and the phrase is not inappropriate. They are certainly records of the year's progresses. In the leisure of the winter days they are profitable for study, if for no other reason than the fact that they are everywhere suggestive. Matters of fact and of practice are presented in bulletins and reports of many organizations. We could not expect to till the soil to advantage in these days without the direct aid of the experimenter.

A file of bulletins should be in the possession of every gardener. They are as useful as tools. And even the facts which they contain are often less valuable than the suggestions which they bring. It is not difficult to read and digest the important parts of all this varied literature, and the reader finds himself possessed of a wonderful grasp upon his business.

Gardens should be mapped and planned by the winter fireside. Formulas for insecticides and fungicides should be familiarized, and materials for making the compounds should be procured. Apparatus for applying them should [be selected while yet there is leisure. And in all this rounding up of the old year and planning for the new, study of markets and marketing should be conspicuous. It is commonly more difficult to market produce than to grow it.

So the garden year begins in intellectual preparation, and it ends in intellectual review. Continuity of thought and purpose run through its months, and if failure comes, it is a lesson for another year. We join our thought to the thought of the times, with the hope of acquiring judgment and purpose. In no other manner can we have hope of success in these modern days. L. H. Bailey.