have been saved, had such Councils of Prudent
Men been established in London during the
recent strike!

SMALL SHOT.

BITS OF GARDEN.

No man or woman has a right, within the
bounds of law, to do anything he or she chooses
or pleases with his or her own. A full-grown
woman, in a semi-detached house, has no right
to begin to learn music at her time of life,
and be zealously determined upon working
herself to what never will be anything like perfection,
by repeating the same tune from eight in the
morning until eleven and a half P.M., with
relaxation only during dinner-time. Perhaps she
has her tea placed beside her on the piano, and
stoops her head to drink while she continues
playing. She cannot be indicted at the petty
sessions. Besides, she may be really the
nicest neighbour in the world, and it is the
inventor of pianos, who ought to undergo
punishment. A fiddle owns that it can only
squeak. A bass-viol never professes to do more
than grumble, or a flute to whistle, or a drum
to make a noise of thumping. All this
associated whistling, squeaking, grumble, and thump,
put together, is delightful, of course, in the
Opera House, to which only those people go
who like it. But a piano violently seizes you
with the pretence that it can do the work of an
entire band; that it can squeak, grumble,
whistle, thump, and otherwise combine varieties
of noise incident to the work that it takes sixty
men to perform properly with other instruments.
The man who invented such a machine in a
form that led to its introduction into houses with
thin party walls, deserved to be bound with
cords of catgut, and to be beaten upon with
small hammers all his days.

Neither has a man any right to do what he
pleases with his own garden. Has a landlord
any title to let a house with a garden to a
tenant known to possess a cart-load of the
ugliest and most lumpish vases that have ever
been turned out of clay? If not, what damages
may the landlord of the house next door be
liable to, unless he will serve a distringas, or
a fierifacias, or something else that is potent,
upon his new tenant, to compel him to arrange
his vases round his dining-room, or round his
bed, or anywhere, so that he may have private
enjoyment of them, and respect the eyesight of
his neighbours. Vitriol works are nothing to
those vases with which some people speckle their
grass. They are of all sizes, and, of course,
perfection of disorder is the sense of order that
has governed their arrangement. The pipkins
are laid near the house, and the further we go
the bigger they grow—none being on pedestals—
until we come to the big boilers at the bottom
of the garden.

From half the back windows in London, who
cannot see, not only muddles of vases, but
jumbles of rustic-work and miserable bursts
of statuary; not to mention, set up in the
middle of grass-plots, basins and self-acting
squirts? Some suburban stucco villas have as
many vases on their parapets as there are
chimney-pots upon their roofs; vases planted
about all over their grounds, generally where
they ought not to be, and always big where they
should be small, or small where they should be
big; and which display from the road as many
statues as a tea-garden.

Somebody should write a book upon the
management of not small gardens merely, but
Bits of Garden. Millions of people obtain
garden ground only by the morsel, and would
like to make out of that morsel an occasion of
rejoicing to the eye. They suppose, perhaps,
that books written for cottagers will meet their
little possibilities. They get such books, and
learn how to earth celery, how to grow
cabbages, how dig in potatoes, and other
information of no use; for the bit of town garden
is not a cottage garden, and requires
peculiar treatment. It cannot be laid out in
accordance with the rules of landscape gardening,
or even of geometrical gardening, to any
great extent, for it must not be chopped
into mince little beds and narrow walks. Not
knowing what to do with our few perches of
space, we either neglect them altogether, or
throw money away upon their elaborate
disfigurement.

The tiniest back-yard might have a pavement,
and one sightly vase kept trim with
flowers, which, through constant household care,
would rise triumphant over the fall of the
blacks. Everybody may now understand that
the root of all sightliness in a small garden is
the exact definition of whatever lines and curves
there may be in it, the neatness of its grass-plot,
and the smoothness of a well-made and well-
drained gravel walk or walks, accessible in every
part to the roller, which should be worked freely
as a sort of household dumb-bell, not only good
for the garden but good for the gardener. But,
beyond this, it is hard to go. How far may the
owner of a bit of garden proceed in the cutting
of small beds out of his grass-plot? How many
combinations of grass, flower-bed, and gravel,
may he fairly get out of a garden of a certain
size and form? The scales of sizes and forms
are, for London at least, very easily defined, and
consequently the instructions here asked for
would be most extensively applicable. These
are the things which thousands of people wish to
be distinctly taught. What trees, ask our town
populations, may be judiciously introduced into
this sort of gardening: in what degree, and in
what positions with regard to other features of
the little pleasaunce? Under what circumstances,
and in what manner, may we introduce a vase, or
a statue, or a bit of rustic-work? How may we
really make, according to our means, the best of
a desire to have an arbour? What gay and
hardy flowers make the best and the least
fugitive ornaments for a garden, from which even the
ceasing of the blossom on a single rose-bush, is
a thing to miss? What flowers ought to be