In a few weeks the kale came up but turned out to be a canard. I then waited two weeks more and other forms of vegetation made their appearance. None of them were kale. A small delegation of bugs which deal mostly with kale came into the garden one day, looked at the picture on the discarded paper, then examined what had crawled out through the ground and went away. I began to fear then that climatic influences had been at work on the seeds, but I had not fully given up all hope. At first the plants seemed to waver and hesitate over whether they had better be wild parsnips or Lima beans. Then I concluded that they had decided to be foliage plants or rhubarb. But they did not try to live up to their portraits. Pretty soon I discovered that they had no bugs which seemed to go with them, and then I knew they were weeds. Things that are good to eat always have bugs and worms on them, while tansy and castor-oil go through life unmolested. I ordered a new style of gladiola eight years ago of a man who had his portrait in the bow of his seed catalogue. If he succeeds no better in resembling his portrait than his gladiolas did in resembling theirs, he must be a human onion whose presence may easily be detected at a great distance. Last year I planted the seeds of a watermelon which I bought of a New York seedsman who writes war articles winters and sells garden seeds in the Spring. The portrait of this watermelon would tempt most any man to climb a nine-rail fence in the dead of night and forget all else in order to drown his better nature and his nose in its cool bosom. People came for miles to look at the picture of this melon and went away with a pleasant taste in their mouths. The plants were a little sluggish, though I planted in hills far apart each way in a rich warm loam enriched by everything that could make a sincere watermelon get up and hump itself. The melons were to be very large indeed, with a center like a rose. According to the picture, these melons generally grew so large and plenty that most everybody had to put side-boards on the garden fence to keep them from falling over into other farms and annoying people who had all the melons they needed. I fought squash bugs, cut worms, Hessian flies, chinch bugs, curculio, mange, pip, drought, dropsy, caterpillars and contumely till the latter part of August, when a friend from India came to visit me. I decided to cut a watermelon in honor of his arrival. When the proper moment had arrived and the dinner had progressed till the point of fruit, the tropical depths of my garden gave up their season's wealth in the shape of a low-browed citron about as large and succulent as a hot ball.