ROM the way trade and magazine writing goes nowadays, many excellent people have supposed, in spite of Mrs. Tarryer's desires to the contrary, that the illustrated letters in the May and June numbers of the Garden, giving an account of certain weeding-tools, were but a thin cover for an implement business, and that the desirable tools pic--tured could be bought, if only word could be got through to Mrs. Tarryer that such were wanted in sundry places. Ready trade pops at the touch of a single postage-stamp, but chaotic realities of the future only crystallize after years of patient thought and work. Mrs. Tarryer is as helpless in the matter of garden-tools as anybody else is, except that she has long known how some of them should be made, and has labored for many years to provide herself and, incidentally a few friends, with weapons of precision for governing the garden. But there is no more trade or manufacture of her styles of garden-tools at present than of pipes for the American mound-builders. Her implements were portrayed in the Garden so that our nakedness of fit tools for hand-weeding - while the land is being overrun with "worthless botany," as Parson Camperdown calls weeds - might become better understood, and in the hope of creating the demand manufacture requires to set its wheels in motion.

Mrs. Tarryer's many friends, visitors and correspondents are hurt in their feelings, sometimes, because she can't give or sell some favorite garden-tool to those who really want and need it to be quite happy. She sympathizes deeply with such cases, for they can't see, in the midst of our whirling machinery, why it is not easy as rolling off a log to get her hand-tillage implements duplicated without number. When our girls and boys go forth gaily into the garden with elegant and efficient means in their hands for conquering the weeds there, it is extremely difficult, for one who has not observed widely and thought deeply of this matter of weeding and tool-making, to realize that there is not a mill close by turning out cords of Mrs. Tarryer's weeders.

It is, indeed, a wonder how within forty or fifty years the country smith who could make beautiful axes, hay-forks, hand-irons, or embody to order any other domestic idea in metal, has become utterly extinct and gone, and how his place is poorly filled with the produce of factories and men who fashion things by models, often degraded, that do not fit our growing cultures, and of whose original intention the hurried artificers know or care nothing.

No doubt Mrs. Tarryer has intended all these recent years, that sometime her tools should be well made, and in sufficient numbers for the discerning cultivators who select and buy for their own uses. She has tried her weeders in the hands of all sorts of people to bring out their worst as well as best points with a view to perfection. Often have I seen her face wince at the casual remark of one who was using her hoes for the first time, when she got a new idea, and I knew it would cost £25, $50, or $100 to realize it exactly in a single sample.

I have been to the bosses of factories with her, and she has invited some of the best of them to Tarrytown. "Do you expect to have that thing made for Irish, Swedes, Norwegians, Poles, or Italians?" (specifying the foreign brethren mostin-clined, in his opinion, to break things), would often be the first question, when the extreme lightness and keenness of some of her implements was first felt in the surprised hand of a manufacturer. After a good dinner and a survey of Mrs. Tarryer's gardening - absolutely weedless for such an occasion, with the mellow loam looking as if it naturally fell in tilth around each plant in her exquisite cultivation - these gentlemen would take a business-like interest in her tools for a few moments. Once an eminent company, persuaded by her proofs of utility, did attempt to make two or three hundred hoes, but never really equipped themselves with fit machines, dies, etc., in determination to have them done cheaply as well as in the best possible manner.

" There is no demand for as good garden-tools as these, Mrs. Tarryer" - or, "you'd better use malleable iron for this part" - or, "why isn't a common shank and ferule as good as that wrought and polished socket?" were the common remarks of these manufacturing characters. They evidently bad little faith in the permanent garden purposes of the people of this broad land, and they were partly right. Lord Bacon said in his old time that the English built better than they planted. So do the Yankees. We say "We can buy garden-stuff cheaper than we can raise it." Yes, and we might as well say we can import grown people cheaper than we can raise children, but a feeling is gaining ground that these reasonings, in a private as well as public point of view, fall to the ground of their own rot. There is no eternal life in them. It was Judas who sold cheaply. Only dear things are worth having.

Mrs. Tarrybr's Weeding Thimble.

Last summer was a very weedy one. But Mrs. Tarryer still believes in the essential humanity of her garden-tools. She has invented a new one of fine tempered steel. Parson Camperdown says it beats all for carrying out the old doctrine of infant damnation for weeds in its purity. I enclose a picture of it. "With that in hand, weeds can be elected to die young - they are happiest so" - is another of his remarks. He says the old preachers were not fools, but weeders, who believed, first and last, that government must begin in the garden; that the men farmer Cromwell recommended to John Hampden as fit to cope with the roistering gentry who followed King Charles, were men who were used literally to governing the land - that the "Ironsides" was a regiment of weeders.

We call the new implement **Mrs. Tarryer's Weeding Thimble," because she used the first one she had in a stooping posture, with her forefinger in it, as her father used a very thin old case-knife, bent at the end. It can be made of any weight, for all sorts of people; stiff enough to haul out the rankest weeds, grass and thinnings from thick-set blackberry rows, or of delicate spring-steel, fit for the tiniest weeds in seedling grass-plats, and with little knob-handles from six inches to six feet long.

" Why don't you get that patented ?" many ask Mrs. Tarryer. Well, she showed it to one patent agent - the very tool in the photograph. He caught on to the novelty at once, and said "That steel spring must be of great value in relieving the nervous shock from the jar of concussion with a billiard ball." He could get a patent on it for a billiard cue! Another agent asked, "Is it intended for pruning trees ?" It is not likely that the employes of the patent office are judges of weeding implements, else the grass around the Capitol would not be overrun with garlic. To get a patent an invention must cause the observer to fall over backwards with astonishment - no matter whether it is good for anything or not. The patent office was designed to assist, protect and reward useful inventions, and though many of our commonest implements sadly need remodelling in the interest of all handicrafts, neither patent law - or the rulings of courts which have muddled the law - tend to any such ends, but rather to leaving the public a prey to the confidence-games of agents and the blindness or worse of ignorant officials.

Meanwhile, as I said before, the curse of weediness and sterility is upon us.

Of "Mrs. Tarryer's Weeding Thimble," she has had a dozen made with infinite patience, trouble and cost, by more than as many different mechanics - hoping to get one that is just right for a model. They are all effective implements, but not one is fit to send the editor of the Garden, and all would be. needed as guides or warnings for an acute manufacturer.

Among intelligent mechanics a feeling is growing that a patent is of no use - even as an advertisement - so much nonsense has been patented. Some say the old maxim of " Live and Let Live," is coming in force, and that when a manufacturer shows that he really knows how to make anything right, his fellows courteously let him do it. If this is not too good to be true, the patent office may fall into a state of innocuous desuetude, unless it goes back to its first principle of understanding our industries and helping and protecting them towards perfection.

In that case Mrs. Tarryer would stand over a few more blacksmiths and handle-makers, in the hopes of getting a "Weeding Thimble" made nice and strong for Commissioner Mitchell and all his clerks to try in their gardens.

You should see her deploy her forces equipped with these millennial instruments! She has a piece of land fallow that she designs for a garden next year. She declares there is no literature describing the best process of fallowing land. Writers are weak in details. The husbandman who does it well has no time to write about it. If you plow and harrow deeply and often, weed seeds don't sprout from the loose soil and be killed. Garden earth must be compact as well as moist during hot weather to promote germination. We might plow and harrow often enough never to sprout and kill a weed.

So when showers have laid the dust upon the smooth surface of that prospective garden-ground, lying as fair as a tennis-court, Mrs. Tarryer ranges her boys and girls facing it, with seven or eight feet of space between them, and explains for the benefit of new hands that the "Tarryer" (for short) must be constantly swinging before them to be ready to hit every weed at sight. So the orders are "Right! - Swing ! - March !" - and away they go ! It is a pretty sight - just the thing for a weedy school where both sexes are trained together in the garden.

The weeds on several acres lie blasted in the track of the young people, after an hour's sun, as if the fire had swept over them. This is done quicker and much better than horses could do it. Mrs. Tarryer often calls a "Halt!" - to explain the nature of the different weeds - how you needn't strike por-tulacca as low as you do rumex, and the like.*

Fall winds are blowing now, to be sure, but we must have the idea of weeding constantly in mind, or no manufacturer will bring out "Mrs. Tarryer's Weeding Thimble" right in time for next season. A light bay-fork is a terror for small weeds, however, in hands that mean to kill them.

Mrs. Tarryer says the above is all right, but I wish to add a word about M'Tavish, Mrs. Schnip-ticket's factotum. He is growing too stout to stoop much, and he did Mrs. Tarryer the questionable honor of carrying one of her "Thimbles" all through carrot and turnip time, greatly to her satisfaction. He says it is the very thing for singling and weeding root crops. He can't see a turnip within a yard of him, and Mrs. Tarryer's long handle reaches to the line of his horizon, so to speak, but any man who is a trifle undersized will sympathize with my disgust at the insinuating way these big, broad Scotchmen have with women.

A. B. Tarryer.

*PusJey and sorrel. - Ed.

The Editor's Outlook.