It was those sashes which gave me the idea of school gardens, I think. If we couldn't have real vocational instruction, at least we might have school gardens, with volunteer instruction and prizes awarded, perhaps, by the Grange. I sent away that evening for bulletins on the subject, and presently took the matter up with the school superintendent and the master of the Grange. Results speedily followed. I discovered that, after all, what our town chiefly lacked (and, inferentially, what similar towns chiefly lack) was a spirit of coöperation among those working for improvement. The selectmen cheerfully gave the use of a piece of town land for the gardens. One of our farmers cheerfully volunteered to plough it. The Grange voted small money prizes as an incentive to the children. And two gardeners on one of the large estates (one of them an Englishman, at that, who was not a citizen) volunteered to come down to the gardens on alternate days, at five o'clock, and give instruction. Finally, our Congressman from the district sent quantities of government seeds, and more were donated by one of the local storekeepers. In two weeks we had a piece of land, nicely ploughed and harrowed, divided into more than twenty little squares, and in each square you could see of an afternoon a small boy toiling. We had the beginnings of vocational instruction. It had been entirely accomplished by voluntary coöperation among the minority who saw the need for it. I was talking this over one day with our new selectman, an Irish-American who had practically grown up into the management of one of the large estates, where he had a perfectly free hand, and his natural strength of character had been developed by responsibility. "The trouble is," he said, "that we organize for political parties, for personal ends, for the election of individuals, but we don't organize for the town. I believe we could start a Town Club, say of twenty-five or fifty men, with the sole object of talking over what the town needs, and inaugurating civic movements. That club would bring together forces that are now scattered and helpless, and put the weight of numbers behind them. There would be no politics in such a club. It would be for the town, not for a party." He carried out his idea, too, and the Bentford Town Club was the result. It meets now once every month, and it gives voice to the hitherto scattered and ineffectual minority. It was this same selectman who altered some of my ideas about grafting. I remarked one day that the town didn't get more than 60 cents' worth of labour for every dollar it spent, and he answered: "Well, if we didn't pay some of those men $2 a day to shovel gravel on the roads, or to break out the snowdrifts in winter, we'd have to pay for their keep in some other way. They would be 'on the town.'"