I fairly gobbled my dinner, and rushed back, a fever of work upon me. Seed beds, that was what I wanted next. As I had planned to put my garden coldframes along the south wall of the kitchen, I decided to make my temporary seed beds there. Mike assented to the plan as a good one, and I had him dump me a load of manure, while I brought earth from the nearest point in the garden, spaded up the soil, mixed in the garden earth and dressing, and then worked and reworked it with a rake, and finally with my hands. Ah, the joy of working earth with your naked hands, making it ready for planting! The ladies I had seen in their gardens always wore gloves. Even my mother, I recalled, in her little garden, had always worn gloves. Surely, thought I, they miss something--the cool, moist feel of the loam, the very sensations of the seeds themselves. At four o'clock I had my bed ready, and I got my seed packets, sorted them in a tin tobacco box, and began to sow the seeds. The directions which I read with scrupulous care always said, "press the earth down firmly with a board." I was working with a flat mason's trowel, so I got up and found a board. It wasn't half so easy to work with, but I was taking no chances! "There must," I grinned, "be some magic efficacy in that board." The seeds were not my own selection. They had been chosen for me by Professor Grey's assistant. That, I confess, was a cloud on my pleasure. Half the fun in sowing flower seeds comes from your hope of achieving those golden promises held out by the seed catalogues--like a second marriage, alas! too often "the triumph of hope over experience"--or else from your memory of some bright bed of the year before. But the cloud was a small one, after all. I sat in the afternoon sun, beneath my kitchen windows, opening little packets of annuals with grimy fingers that turned the white papers brown, and gently, lovingly, put the seeds into the ground. I had no beds as yet to transplant them to; very often I didn't know whether they could be transplanted. (As it turned out, I wasted all my poppy seeds.) But I was in no mood to wait. As each little square was sown, I thrust the packet on a stick for a marker, and hitched along to the next square. Bachelors' buttons, love-in-a-mist, Drummond's phlox, zinnias, asters, stock, annual larkspur, cosmos, mignonette (of course I lost all that later, as well as the poppies), marigolds, nasturtiums, and several more went into the soil. My border seeds, the sweet alyssum and lobelia, I had sense enough not to plant, and I sowed none of the perennials. But what I put in was enough to keep a gardener busy the rest of the summer. Then I got my new watering-pot, filled it at the kitchen sink, and gently watered the hopeful earth.