Miss Viola Smith, Summit county, O., remarks : "What can horticulture do towards making happy homes for children ? Let us imagine a house built on a plot of bare, plowed ground. Let nothing be planted there, let nothing grow there, except the weeds and briers which naturally spring up. Let a family of children be reared in that house and what will they be ? It is almost certain that they will develop one of two phases of character. Either they will live in perpetual discord with their surroundings, hating their desolate abiding-place and improving the first opportunity to escape from it, or they will sink to the level of their circumstances and be content in their degradation. A child which could be patient with such a situation in life, and yet refined in its nature, would be one of those of whom we say ' Not long for this world.' There may have been a few such children, but they never need long graves.

" Now what can horticulture do for such a place? First, it can make grass grow. It can change the rough clods, half-covered with dock and plantain, to a well kept lawn, as green as emerald and almost as smooth as velvet. And who can estimate the difference which that one improvement would have made in the lives and destinies of the children of that household ? It can not be estimated. Such an improvement would have compelled others, and they in turn others, and so the circle would have gone on widening".