brief, my aim is to have the book grow out of actual experience, and not merely my own, either.  As far as possible, well-known experts and authorities are consulted on every point.  As a natural consequence, the book is growing, like the plants to which it relates.  It cannot be written “offhand” or finished “on time” to suit any one except Dame Nature, who, being feminine, is often inscrutable and apparently capricious.  The experience of one season is often reversed in the next, and the guide in gardening of whom I am most afraid is the man who is always sure he is right.  It was my privilege to have the late Mr. Charles Downing as one of my teachers, and well do I remember how that honest, sagacious, yet docile student of nature would “put on the brakes” when I was passing too rapidly to conclusions.  It has always been one of my most cherished purposes to interest people in the cultivation of the soil and rural life.  My effort is to “boil down” information to the simplest and most practical form.  Last spring, hundreds of varieties of vegetables and small fruits were planted.  A carefully written record is being kept from the time of planting until the crop is gathered.

My methods of work are briefly these:  I go into my study immediately after breakfast—­usually about nine o’clock—­and write or study until three or four in the afternoon, stopping only for a light lunch.  In the early morning and late afternoon I go around my place, giving directions to the men, and observing the condition of vegetables, flowers, and trees, and the general aspect of nature at the time.  After dinner, the evening is devoted to the family, friends, newspapers, and light reading.  In former years I wrote at night, but after a severe attack of insomnia this practice was almost wholly abandoned.  As a rule, the greater part of a year is absorbed in the production of a novel, and I am often gathering material for several years in advance of writing.

For manuscript purposes I use bound blankbooks of cheap paper.  My sheets are thus kept securely together and in place—­important considerations in view of the gales often blowing through my study and the habits of a careless man.  This method offers peculiar advantages for interpolation, as there is always a blank page opposite the one on which I am writing.  After correcting the manuscript, it is put in typewriting and again revised.  There are also two revisions of the proof.  While I do not shirk the tasks which approach closely to drudgery, especially since my eyesight is not so good as it was, I also obtain expert assistance.  I find that when a page has become very familiar and I am rather tired of it, my mind wanders from the close, fixed attention essential to the best use of words.  Perhaps few are endowed with both the inventive and the critical faculty.  A certain inner sense enables one to know, according to his lights, whether the story itself is true or false; but elegance of style is