Little gardens of their own are perhaps the best gifts which can be given to children. To work in them stores up not only health but joy. Every flower in their garden stands for so much happiness, and with that happiness an instinct for home life and simple pleasures will strike deep roots. From growing the humblest annual out of a seed-packet to grafting roses there is work for every age, and even in the dead season of the year the interest of a garden never dies. In new countries gardens take new aspects. A literal version of a _garden party_ in the Transvaal suggests possibilities of emancipation from the conventionalities which weary the older forms of entertainment with us. Its object was not to play in a garden, but to plant one. Guests came from afar, each one bringing a contribution of plants. The afternoon was spent in laying out the beds and planting the offerings, in hard, honest, dirty work. And all the guests went home feeling that they had really lived a day that was worth living, for a garden had been made, in the rough, it is true; but even in the rough in such a new country a garden is a great possession. The outcome of these considerations is that the love of nature is a great source of happiness for children, happiness of the best kind in taking possession of a world that seems to be in many ways designed especially for them. It brings their minds to a place where many ways meet; to the confines of science, for they want to know the reasons of things; to the confines of art, for what they can understand they will strive to interpret and express; to the confines of worship, for a child's soul, hushed in wonder, is very near to God. CHAPTER VIII. ENGLISH. "If Chaucer, as has been said, is Spring, it is a modern, premature Spring, followed by an interval of doubtful weather. Sidney is the very Spring--the later May. And in prose he is the authentic, only Spring. It is a prose full of young joy, and young power, and young inexperience, and young melancholy, which is the wilfulness of joy; . . . "Sidney's prose is treasureable, not only for its absolute merits, but as the bud from which English prose, that gorgeous and varied flower, has unfolded."--FRANCIS THOMPSON, "The Prose of Poets."