The saying that God sent food but the devil sent cooks may be adapted to horticulture, as a rule, 1 think; but it should certainly not be applied indiscriminately. The usual “jobber” is a man from whom employers expect a great deal but get very little that is satisfactory. That is because employers are unreasonable. The ordinary “working gardener” does not think, because he is not paid to think: he does not get the wages of a man who is required to use his brain. When one discovers all that a gardener should know, and learns that the average wage of the trade is from one pound to thirty shillings a week, the unreasonableness of expecting a high order of intelligence to be placed at your service for such pay will be apparent. Of course a “head” at an establishment where he is called a “curator” and has half a dozen assistants, gets a decent salary and fully earns it; but the pay of the greater number of the men who call themselves gardeners is low out of all proportion to what their qualifications should be. Now this being so, is the improvement to come by increasing the wages of the usual type of garden jobber? I doubt it. My experience leads me to believe very strongly in the employer's being content with work only, and in his making no demand for brains or erudition from the man to whom he pays twenty-five shillings a week--pre-war rates, of course: the war-time equivalent would, of course, be something like £2 5s.--the brains and erudition should be provided by himself. The employer or some member of his family should undertake the direction of the work and ask for the work only from the man. I know that the war days were the means of developing this system beyond all that one thought possible five or six years ago; and of one thing I am sure, and this is that no one who has been compelled to “take up” his own garden will ever go back to the old way, the leading note of which was the morning grumble at the inefficiency of the gardener, and the evening resolution to fire him out. The distinction between exercise and work has, within the past few fateful years, been obliterated; and it has become accepted generally that to sweat over the handle of a lawnmower is just as ennobling as to perspire for over after over at a bowling crease; and that the man who comes in earth-stained from his allotment, is not necessarily the social inferior of the man who carries away on his knees a sample of the soil of the football field. There may be a distinction between the work and the play; but it is pretty much the same as the difference between the Biblical verb to sweat and the boudoir word to perspire. The pores are opened by the one just as healthfully as by the other. And in future I am pretty sure that we shall all sweat and rarely perspire.