"There is no begging the question; if you garden you must kill wholesale. There is only one alternative. You can throw the big nuisances over into your neighbour's plot, but it is only a temporary palliation, for he is sure not to like it, and certain to throw them back. Besides, you may have some compunction in the matter, and as the small nuisances cannot be thrown over, one kills and slays wholesale. It is terrible to think of! Intentionally and unintentionally one slays millions of creatures a year, beginning with one's beef, and going down to the tiniest aphis that one treads upon in one's daily walk, so that if it is wicked to kill slugs, it must be equally unjust to slay the tiniest fly. Why it is quite appalling, this reckoning up of crime. Those calceolarias were covered with lovely little green-flies right up the blossom stalks, and without compunction there was a massacre of the insects with tobacco water. That croquet lawn was infested with great worms, and they were watered with solution of copperas to crawl out and die. The great shelled snails that made a raid by regiments upon the strawberry beds were supplied with pillars of salt. The birds after much forbearance, were condemned to death for stealing cherries and black and red currants and gooseberries; so were the rabbits for nibbling off the tops of the tender broccoli and Brussels sprout plants. As a romantic young lady would say, this garden has been literally stained with gore, but the gore does not show, and the garden is the more abundant and green for the removal of its plagues.