A Garden Wall

1895

I do not dislike garden walls. It is sometimes a good and consoling thought to reflect that one is in a well secured inclosure, alone with perfumes, flowers, trees, the air, the sun, the stars, remembrances and reveries, and to know that nobody can come and disturb you. I like walls, but I do not like white walls. I like nothing but old walls. I have one here which pleases me much. It is just as old as it ought to be. If it were a little older, it would be given over to the mercy of bricklayers, who would introduce all sorts of new bricks and white stones. As it is, it is gray and slack and diversified with the subdued tints of 20 species of mosses and lichens. It is crowned with yellow wallflowers and ferns, which root in the crevices on its summit, and its base is buttressed by pellitory and nettle in masses of richest green. — Alphonse Karr.

Empress Eugenie Returns to Paris

Dec. 1919

Is Now Pathetic Figure, Bowed by Sorrow of Years.

PARIS, France — With bowed head and with face of infinite sadness, a modestly dressed old lady was seen walking through Tulleries Gardens today. As she walked she would stop to pick autumn flowers, seared and blasted by the cold, but no more faded than her cheeks. Passers-by, seeing her and knowing the regulations of the park, expected some policeman to admonish her, but she passed on, followed by a single maid, unchecked by the uniformed representative of the law.

It was the once proud Empress Eugenie, who, bowed beneath the weight of 93 winters, thus plucked withered flowers from a garden that was once hers. She was revisiting a scene poignantly recalling all the happiness, sorrow and terror which came to her during her years she was the chiefest jewel of the old palatial mansion.

Empress Eugenie left France on July 23, the fateful day when the then proud and haughty Austria sent an ultimatum to Serbia which was destined to dismember realms and change the whole face of history.

Secret of a Flower - What Might They Know?

1916

How Did the Trumpet Vine Discover the Bared Stump?

If someone advanced the theory that this plant had some unknown power of reasoning you would probably reply that "plants can't reason because they have no mind." You may change your opinion after you hear this story, related by Royal Dixon, who writes entertainingly about how near like human beings in their actions plants are.

The story is about a trumpet vine, the favorite of many an old fashioned garden. About twenty feet from where it grew was an old pine stump with the bark on. One day a fire was built about the foot of the stump, and the bark was burned off.

Immediately the trumpet vine sent forth a long trailer across the garden to the stump. It raised the tendrils, felt the smooth surface of the stump and started to climb. Before long the whole blackened surface was hidden beneath the leaves and blossoms of the new vine.

With the rough bark on the stump it provided no surface for the clinging tendrils of the vine. After the fire destroyed the bark the vine found a place to climb.

How did the plant know that the fire had prepared the stump? We don't know. Ask the flower! — Philadelphia North American.

The Gigantic, Creaking, Groaning Water Wheels of Syria

1916

Creaking, Groaning Monsters That Liven a City in Syria

Hama, in Syria, says a writer in the Wide World Magazine, is famed for its huge water wheels, locally known as naura. There are four of them, and they are driven by the river Orontes, which flows through the town. Each of the wheels bears a distinguished name, and the visitor to the city is made aware of their presence long before be sees them by the creaking and groaning noise which greets his ear. At first it suggests a pipe organ and later a brass band practicing.

The wheels are built of a dark mahogany, which gives them at a distance the appearance of iron. The largest of them boasts of a diameter of seventy-five feet and is declared to be the biggest water wheel in existence. The naura are erected on what is known as the undershot principle — that is to say, they are driven by the water striking them at their base. They serve not only to supply the town with water, but also irrigate the adjacent gardens.

The wheels never stop, summer or winter, and day and night their creaking and groaning are heard. In the summer months small boys may always be seen bathing in the river in the neighborhood of the wheels, and for a small coin they will get in between the spokes of the wheels and allow themselves to be carried around many times or bang on the outside or the wheel and drop back into the water when halfway up.

—Stevens Point Daily Journal, Stevens Point, Wisconsin, July 29, 1916, page 7.

Lyrics of Life: "The Little Valleys" (poetry)

1921

Lyrics of Life
By Douglas Malloch

THE LITTLE VALLEYS

The little valleys lie so far
From where the busy cities are
That men may live and men may die
And never find them where they lie,
The little valleys near the sky.

Shut in by plain and sturdy hills
That feed the grasses with their rills,
The little valleys do not seem
A part of all life's roaring stream—
But just a landscape and a dream.

A few green acres, that is all,
The mountains like a garden wall
In quiet peace to shut them in,
To shut away the dirt, the din.
And all the world of noisy sin.

And, oh, I wish that weary feet
Could find the little valleys sweet—
And, oh, I wish the weary heart
That feels the bruises of the mart
Could find this little world apart!

"God's gardens," so I call the vales
Up yonder by the mountain trails;
And you who cry for heaven's aid
You will not find it, I'm afraid,
Where man his busy world has made.

You must come tramping over hills.
Come follow singing whip-poor-wills,
Must journey long and clamber high
To where God's hidden gardens lie—
The little valleys near the sky.

—Mountain Democrat, Placerville, California, October 29, 1921, page 6.

Toads Valued in France

1925

Toads, the rotund garden variety, have a market value in France. The French gardeners claim that this warty-skinned amphibian devours its weight in injurious plant insects every 24 hours, and is encouraged to live in their gardens. Killing one of these insect hunters in France is considered the height of folly.


Bleaching Beeswax

Beeswax may be bleached by running in thin ribbons through a machine and allowing it to remain in the sunlight. Some beeswax bleaches more readily than others. It will take several weeks to bleach it.


Formation of Grand Bank

The Grand bank of Newfoundland is supposed to be composed of deposits of solid matter brought from the Arctic seas by icebergs, which gradually melt by contact with the warm water of the Gulf stream.


Ranks High in Literature

The Heimskringla has been called "the most important prose work in old Norse literature." It is a history of Norse kings. Some were mythical, others real. The author was an Icelander, Snorri Sturluson (1178-1241).


Mexican Frijol

The word frijol in Spanish connotes almost any variety of cultivated beans, but in Mexico it is applied almost exclusively to the brown or spotted varieties known in English-speaking countries as kidney beans.


Bee's Average Life Six Weeks

A bee hatched in early summer does not live to eat the honey it gathers, as its average life through the busy season is not more than six weeks. Only those born in late autumn live till the spring.

—Bedford Gazette, Bedford, Pennsylvania, August 7, 1925.