A pathetic story credited to the Charleston News and Courier is going the rounds about a shoemaker who willed to his brother an ornamental flower box or pot. The box was filled with shoe pegs, shoemaker's awls, "et cetera." He had not curiosity enough to look into the matter, but carefully lifted the flower pot, with its "et cetera," into an old chest. Some years later he lifted it out and gave it, the shoe pegs, awls, and "et cetera," and all to his little girl for a plaything. He died. The widow put in a geranium and it grew in the pot all one summer in the cemetery near Charleston, over the dead man's grave. In fall the geranium and soil were turned out and again the pot became a child's plaything. She smashed it, when lo and behold! they had never noted that the wooden flower pot had a false bottom, and that there were besides some half dollars, one hundred and thirty-five dollars in nice crisp bank notes that had been concealed therein !

That reporter should have been a gardener. If the water could get through the false bottom the bank notes would have soon moulded and rotted. If not a drop could get through, the geranium would not have grown at all. No one could grow a geranium in a pot with the hole utterly covered up. A pond lily might grow in a pot of water but a geranium would not.

They talk of teaching horticulture in the public schools; and yet millions of intelligent people will gulp that story down as gently as a sucking babe, with delightful confidence in its verity! We might have horticulture taught; but where are the teachers ? Thomas Meehan.