He looked at the members of the Board, and, like the poker player who said, “I pass,” when he heard who had dealt the cards, he made no attempt to defend himself. He laid out the Educational Garden that was required of him, and when he had done so and the Board thought that he was resigned to his fate as the interpreter of the rules of prosody as applied to a garden, he handed in his resignation, and informed them that he had accepted a situation as Curator of a park in a rival town, and at a salary--a Curator gets a salary and a gardener only wages--of exactly double the sum granted to him by the employers from whom he was separating himself. In three years the place he left had become bankrupt and was wound up. It was bought at a scrapping figure by the Municipality, and its swings are now said to be the highest in five counties. I saw the Educational Garden that he laid out, and knew, and so did he, that he was “laying out”--the undertaker's phrase--the whole concern. When he had completed it, I felt that I could easily resist the temptation to introduce education at the expense of design into any garden of mine. It is undeniable that a place constructed on such a botanical system may be extremely interesting to a number of students, and especially so to druggists' apprentices; but turning to so-called “educational purposes” a piece of garden that can grow roses, is like using the silk of an embroiderer to darn the corduroys of a railway porter. But it was a revelation to some people how the growing of war-time vegetables where only flowers had previously been grown, was not out of harmony with the design of a garden. I must confess that it was with some misgiving that I planted rows of runner beans in a long wall border which had formerly been given over to annuals, and globe artichokes where lilies did once inhabit--I even went so far as to sow carrots in lines between the echeverias of the stone-edged beds, and lettuces at the back of my fuchsia bushes. But the result from an æsthetic standpoint was so gratifying that I have not ceased to wonder why such beautiful things should be treated as were the fruit-trees, and looked on as steerage passengers are by the occupants of the fifty-guinea staterooms of a fashionable Cunarder. The artichoke is really a garden inmate; alongside the potatoes in the kitchen garden, it is like the noble Sir Pelleas who was scullery-maid in King Arthur's household. The globe artichoke is like one of those British peers whom we hear of--usually when they have just died--as serving in the forecastle of a collier tramp. It is a lordly thing, and, I have found, it makes many of the most uppish forms in the flower garden hide diminished heads. An edging of dwarf cabbages of some varieties is quite as effective as one of box, and Dell's “black beet” cannot be beaten where a foliage effect is desired. Of course the runner bean must be accepted as a flower. If