At last, it was time to make the place for the seeds.  Margery and her mother helped.  Father tied one end of a cord to a little stake, and drove the stake in the ground at one end of the garden.  Then he took the cord to the other end of the garden and pulled it tight, tied it to another stake, and drove that down.  That made a straight line for him to see.  Then he hoed a trench, a few inches deep, the whole length of the cord, and scattered fertilizer in it.  Pretty soon the whole garden was in lines of little trenches.

“Now for the corn,” said father.

Margery ran and brought the seed box, and found the package of corn.  It looked like kernels of gold, when it was opened.

“May I help?” Margery asked, when she saw how pretty it was.

“If you watch me sow one row, I think you can do the next,” said her father.

So Margery watched.  Her father took a handful of kernels, and, stooping, walked slowly along the line, letting the kernels fall, five or six at a time, in spots about a foot apart; he swung his arm with a gentle, throwing motion, and the golden seeds trickled out like little showers, very exactly.  It was pretty to watch; it made Margery think of a photograph her teacher had, a photograph of a famous picture called “The Sower.”  Perhaps you have seen it.

Putting in the seed was not so easy to do as to watch; sometimes Margery got in too much, and sometimes not enough; but her father helped fix it, and soon she did better.

They planted peas, beans, spinach, carrots, and parsnips.  And Margery’s father made a row of holes, after that, for the tomato plants.  He said those had to be transplanted; they could not be sown from seed.

When the seeds were in the trenches they had to be covered up, and Margery really helped at that.  It is fun to do it.  You stand beside the little trench and walk backward, and as you walk you hoe the loose earth back over the seeds; the same dirt that was hoed up you pull back again.  Then you rake very gently over the surface, with the back of a rake, to even it all off.  Margery liked it, because now the garden began to look like a garden.

But best of all was the work next day, when her own little particular garden was begun.  Father Brown loved Margery and Margery’s mother so much that he wanted their garden to be perfect, and that meant a great deal more work.  He knew very well that the old grass would begin to come through again on such “green” soil, and that it would make terribly hard weeding.  He was not going to have any such thing for his two “little girls,” as he called them.  So he fixed that little garden very fine!  This is what he did.