“It certainly has a sufficiently horrid smell,” exclaimed Ethel Brown.  “I don’t wonder the beasties curl up and die; I’d like to myself.”

“They say aphis doesn’t come on a plant with healthy sap,” Ethel Blue contributed to this talk, “so the thing to do is to make these plants so healthy that the animals drop off starved.”

“This new development is going to be a great comfort to me if it keeps on,” Mrs. Emerson confessed to her daughter humorously.  “I shall encourage the girls to use my plants for instruction whenever they want to.”

“You may laugh at their sudden affection,” returned Mrs. Morton seriously, “but I’ve noticed that everything the U.S.C. sets its heart on doing gets done, and I’ve no doubt whatever that they’ll have what Roger calls ‘some’ garden this next summer.”

“Roger has had long consultations with his grandfather about fertilizers and if he’s interested in the beginnings of a garden and not merely in the results I think we can rely on him.”

“They have all been absorbed in the subject for three months and now

    ’Lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;
    The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of
        birds is come.’”

Roger maintained that his Aunt Louise’s house ought to be begun at the time that he planted his sweetpeas.

“If I can get into the ground enough to plant, surely the cellar diggers ought to be able to do the same,” he insisted.

March was not over when he succeeded in preparing a trench a foot deep all around the spot which was to be his vegetable garden except for a space about three feet wide which he left for an entrance.  In the bottom he placed three inches of manure and over that two inches of good soil.  In this he planted the seeds half an inch apart in two rows and covered them with soil to the depth of three inches, stamping it down hard.  As the vines grew to the top of the trench he kept them warm with the rest of the earth that he had taken out, until the opening was entirely filled.

The builder was not of Roger’s mind about the cellar digging, but he really did begin operations in April.  Every day the Mortons and Smiths, singly or in squads, visited the site of Sweetbrier Lodge, as Mrs. Smith and Dorothy had decided to call the house.  Dorothy had started a notebook in which to keep account of the progress of the new estate, but after the first entry—­“Broke ground to-day”—­matters seemed to advance so slowly that she had to fill in with memoranda concerning the growth of the garden.

Even before the house was started its position and that of the garage had been staked so that the garden might not encroach on them.  Then the garden had been laid out with a great deal of care by the united efforts of the Club and Mr. Emerson and his farm superintendent.