On the day you intend to take up the seedlings from any bed, if you have water enough at command, flood the bed. This, as you take up each seedling, will cause the soil, being moist, to adhere better to the roots. The difference between young plants transplanted with a ball of earth round the roots, and those moved with their roots bare, is no less than three months’ growth, if even it does not make the difference between life and death. Proceed thus to ensure the former. At one short end of the bed, the lowest if it is on a slope, dig close to the first row of seedlings a trench so deep that its base shall be lower than the lowest end of the tap-roots. Then with a five or six-pronged steel fork (this is better than a spade, for it does not cut the rootlets) put in between the first and second row, and pressed down with the foot to its head, force carefully so much of the row down into the trench. Then with the hand take up each seedling separately, helping the soil with a very light pressure (so light that it shall not change the lateral direction of any of the rootlets) to adhere, and place it in a low basket sloping. Do this again and again, till two baskets are full, when they will be carried, banghy fashion, to the garden. When the first row is finished clear away the loose soil, so that a similar trench to the first shall be formed, and then proceed as above with the second row, and so on. No further directions for lifting the seedlings out of the nurseries are required. All is ready for their reception in the garden if the directions at pages 59 and 75 have been followed out. The work now to be detailed must be done by careful men well superintended. In the soft soil of the lately filled up pit, described at page 59, a hole is made either with the hand or a narrow kodalee (the former, if the soil has not settled much, will suffice), large enough and deep enough to take in the seedling with all the earth attached to it. The seedling is then put in and the soil filled in and round it, which completes the operation. The manner, though, in which this is done is of great consequence. Four things are all important:--(1) That the tap-root shall not be turned up at the end because the hole is too shallow. (2) That any rootlets projecting outside the attached earth shall be laid in the hole, and shall preserve, when the soil is filled in, their lateral direction. (3) That the collar of the plant (the spot where the stem entered the earth in the nursery) shall be, when the pit is filled up, about 1-1/2 inch higher than the surface of the surrounding earth. (4) That in filling in the hole the soil is pressed down enough to make it unlikely to sink later, but not enough to “cake” the mould. The following is the consequence of failure in these four points:--