sky. So long as habit or love of caring for the things lasted all went
well. The father found his recreation in planting the garden before
breakfast, as in his boyhood. The mother cared for flower and
vegetable-garden, as she recalled her mother's life; she picked her own
beans and corn, even if she did not cook the dinner.

But the _children_ had to hurry off to school, and it was a pity to call
them early: they had lessons to learn in the afternoon. To them the garden
was work, not play as it should have been; so they failed to gain that
contact with mother earth which gives inspiration as well as health; they
failed to acquire a love of nature, became infected with the germ of
gregariousness, preferred the glare of lights, the rush of hurrying
crowds, and lost the relish for fresh air and quiet. This second
generation came to the city boarding-house and flat as soon as they were
free, leaving their parents' houses to go the same way as the
grandfather's farmhouse, into the hands of the foreigner not yet
Americanized to high standards of cleanliness and orderliness.

These houses, too, are settling down into unkempt grounds with
dilapidated porches and blinds. Such eyesores as one finds on the
trolley-lines in any direction! They may have town-water supply, or they
may depend on wells, but they are frequently without sewer-connection.

It is costly to be neat and clean, and only those whose minds require such
surroundings in order to be comfortable will pay the cost in time,
trouble, and money.

(3) Some families made a compromise and built what is called a modern
house with bath-room and furnace (after the air-tight-stove craze passed),
with jigsaw ornamentation outside and in, pretentious-looking dwellings