When the planting was done most of the children believed that the hardest part of the task was over. Year after year successive classes failed to realize the fact of _Time_. As the weeks passed and the slow development that is nature's way to perfection went on, one would hear a boy say, "Next year I'm going to plant radishes; they grow faster," and another, "You will never get me to plant squashes again; they're too slow."
These young gardeners found very difficult, and some found quite impossible, the task of _waiting_, meanwhile working with the soil and protecting the growing plants, that the flower and fruit might be as fine as possible. Despite encouragement from other children and from instructors, some of the boys and girls lost their enthusiasm entirely and seldom looked at their gardens.
Those boys and girls, planting their seeds of flower and fruit on the sunny hillside and in the shaded nooks where the school gardens lay, were not at all unlike the men and women who today plant the good seed in the gardens of hearts that come to them in the glorious springtime of life ready for the sowing. Like the boys and girls these older gardeners are pleased with the picture of the result of their seed sowing. With enthusiasm they enter upon the task of planting, with eagerness they watch for the first appearance of results. And then Time enters in. There is evidence of weeds; slugs and worms appear. Then comes the clear call for the two great virtues of the sower who will win a harvest--Labor and Patience. He must cultivate the soil, else only the meager harvest can be his. The art of cultivation is the one so many would-be harvesters fail to learn.
To realize what the art of cultivation can accomplish one needs to read carefully the increase in the record of the producing power of certain wheat fields in our country during the past four years. Courage comes with the study of the reports of modern miracles accomplished through the advice and instruction of the agricultural schools and colleges which have escaped from the thraldom of the abstract. Every one should look once into the faces of boys and girls of the rural schools who having been instructed in the art of cultivation have practised it and increased the value and quantity of the output on their fathers' farms, ten-fold. It fills one with hope to look into the bright eager face of a fourteen-year-old prize winner, holding side by side in his hand the stalks of corn, one small and meager, the other rich and full, made so by the art of cultivation which he has so patiently practised.