Though garden flowers run everywhere that they will, they are not easily forced to become wild flowers. We hear much of the pleasure of sowing garden seeds along the roadside, and children are urged to make beautiful wild gardens to be the delight of passers-by. Alphonse Karr wrote most charmingly of such sowings, and he pictured the delight and surprise of country folk in the future when they found the choice blooms, and the confusion of learned botanists in years to come. The delight and surprise and confusion would have been if any of his seeds sprouted and lived! A few years ago a kindly member of our United States Congress sent to me from the vast seed stores of our national Agricultural Department, thousands of packages of seeds of common garden flowers to be given to the poor children in public kindergartens and primary schools in our great city. The seeds were given to hundreds of eager flower lovers, but starch boxes and old tubs and flower pots formed the limited gardens of those Irish and Italian children, and the Government had sent to me such "hats full, sacks full, bushel-bags full," that I was left with an embarrassment of riches. I sent them to Narragansett and amused myself thereafter by sowing several pecks of garden seeds along the country roadsides; never, to my knowledge, did one seed live and produce a plant. I watched eagerly for certain plantings of Poppies, Candytuft, Morning-glories, and even the indomitable Portulaca; not one appeared. I don't know why I should think I could improve on nature; for I drove through that road yesterday and it was radiant with Wild Rose bloom, white Elder, and Meadow Beauty; a combination that Thoreau thought and that I think could not be excelled in a cultivated garden. Above all, these are the right things in the right place, which my garden plants would not have been. I am sure that if they had lived and crowded out these exquisite wild flowers I should have been sorry enough. [Illustration: Fountain at Yaddo.]