These little incidental recompenses of the most perfect domestic harmony were realized in everything we undertook. That harmony was the animating as well as sustaining power of my horticultural enterprise. Had there been wrangling, opposition, or ridicule, it is probable that I should never have ventured on the planting of a single strawberry. Success, situated as I was, was dependent on united effort, the cooeperation of all. This cooeperation of the entire family must be still more necessary in agricultural undertakings on a large scale. A wife, taken reluctantly from the city to a farm, with no taste for rural life, no love of flowers, no fondness for the garden, no appreciation of the mysteries of seed-time and harvest, no sensibility to fields of clover, to green meadows, to the grateful silence of the woods, or to the voices of birds, and who pines for the unforgotten charms of city life, may mar the otherwise assured happiness of the household. One refractory inmate in ours would have been especially calamitous. The floral world is pervaded with miraculous sympathies. Another spring had opened on our garden, and flower after flower came out into gorgeous bloom. My strawberries, as if conscious of the display around them, and ambitious to increase it, opened their white blossoms toward the close of April. Those set the preceding autumn gave promise of an abundant yield, but not equal to that presented by the runners which crowded around the parent plants on the original half-acre. The winter had been unfriendly, sending no heavy covering of snow to shelter them; while the frost, in making its first escape from the earth, had loosened many plants, bringing some of them half-way out of the ground, while a few had been thrown entirely upon the surface, where they quickly perished. I had read that accidents of this kind would sometimes happen, and that, when plants were thus partially dislodged by frost, the roller must be passed over them to crowd back the roots into their proper places. I had discovered this derangement immediately on the frost escaping, but we had neither roller nor substitute. As pressure alone was needed, I set Fred to walking over the entire acre, and with his heavy winter boots to trample down each plant in its old place. The operation was every way as beneficial as if the ground had been well rolled. When performed before the roots have been many days exposed to the air, it not only does no injury, but effectually repairs all damage committed by the frost.