We proceeded to adopt and adapt the
plan, and had our first competition and award of prizes in 1898-'99.
Like Dunfermline, we made our prizes large, and to this we attribute no
small part of our success. When we saw fit to increase their number we
increased the total outlay as well, and at present we award twenty-one
prizes a year, the highest being fifteen dollars, and one hundred
dollars the sum of the whole twenty-one prizes. So we have gained one of
our main purposes: to tempt into the contest the man of the house and
thus to stimulate in him that care and pride of his home, the decline of
which, in the man of the house, is one of the costliest losses of hard
living.
One day on their round of inspection our garden judges came to a small
house at the edge of the town, near the top of a hill through which the
rustic street cuts its way some twelve or fifteen feet below. The air
was pure, the surroundings green, the prospect wide and lovely. Here was
a rare chance for picturesque gardening. Although the yard was without a
fence there had been some planting of flowers in it. Yet it could hardly
be called a garden. So destitute was it of any intelligent plan and so
uncared for that it seemed almost to have a conscious, awkward
self-contempt. In the flecked shade of a rude trellis of grapes that
sheltered a side door two children of the household fell to work with
great parade at a small machine, setting bristles into tooth-brushes for
a neighboring factory, but it was amusingly plain that their labor was
spasmodic and capricious.
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