Now to begin:  will your shady place yield you a bed four feet in width by at least twenty in length?  If so, set Barney to work with pick and spade.  The top, I take it, is old turf not good enough to use for edging, so after removing this have it broken into bits and put in a heap by itself.  When the earth beneath is loosened, examine it carefully.  If it is good old mellow loam without the pale yellow colour that denotes the sterile, undigested soil unworked by roots or earthworms, have it taken out to eighteen inches in depth and shovelled to one side.  When the bad soil is reached, which will be soon, have it removed so that the pit will be three feet below the level.

Next, let Barney collect any old broken bits of flower-pots, cobbles, or small stones of any kind, and fill up the hole for a foot, and let the broken turf come on top of this.  If possible, beg or buy of Amos Opie a couple of good loads of the soil from the meadow bottom where the red bell-lilies grow, and mix this with the good loam, together with a scattering of bone, before replacing it.  The bed should not only be full, but well rounded.  Grade it nicely with a rake and wait a week or until rain has settled it before planting.  When setting these lilies, let there be six inches of soil above the bulb, and sprinkle the hole into which it goes with fresh-water sand mixed with powdered sulphur.

This bed will be quite large enough for a beginning and will allow you four rows of twenty bulbs in a row, with room for them to spread naturally into a close mass, if so desired.  Or better yet, do not put them in stiff rows, but in groups, alternating the early-flowering with the late varieties.  A row of German Iris at the back of this bed will give solidity and the sturdy foliage make an excellent windbreak in the blooming season.  If your friendly woman in the back country will give you two dozen of the Madonna lily bulbs, group them in fours, leaving a short stake in the middle of each group that you may know its exact location, for the other lilies you cannot obtain before October, unless you chance to find them in the garden of some near-by florist or friend.  These are—­

  Lilium speciosum album—­white recurved.
  Lilium speciosum rubrum—­spotted with ruby-red.
  Lilium speciosum roseum—­spotted with rose-pink.

All three flower in August and September, rubrum being the latest, and barring accidents increase in size and beauty with each year.

In spite of the fact of their fickleness, I would buy a dozen or two of the auratum lilies, for even if they last but for a single year, they are so splendid that we can almost afford to treat them as a fleeting spectacle.  As the speciosum lilies (I wish some one would give them a more gracious name—­we call them curved-shell lilies here among ourselves) do not finish flowering sometimes until late in September, the bulbs are not ripe in time to be sold through the stores, until there is danger of the ground being frozen at night.