asked Mr. Brief, "that home-raised peas are sweeter than any other?"

"We think so," said Mrs. Idiot.

"We know so," amended the Idiot. "That Fourth-of-July night when we ate those five podfuls we discovered that fact. Five podfuls of peas are not enough to feed a family of four on, so we mixed them in with a few more that we bought at the grocer's, and we could tell ours from the others every time, they were so much sweeter."

The Bibliomaniac laughed scornfully.

"Pooh!" said he. "How did you know that they were yours that were sweet, and not the grocery-bought peas?"

"How does a father know his own children?" said the Idiot. "If you'd labored over those five pods as hard and assiduously as we did, nursing them through their infant troubles, guarding them against locusts and potato-bugs, carefully watching their development from infancy into the full vigor of a mature peahood, I guess you'd know your own from those of others. It's instinct, my dear Bibliomaniac.""Tell about the strawberry, pa," said Tommy, who liked to hear his father talk, in which respect I fear he takes strongly after his parent.

"Well," said the Idiot, "it's not much of a story. There was one. We had a strawberry patch twenty feet by ten. We had plenty of straw and plenty of patch, but the berries were timid about appearing. The results were similar to those in our asparagus venture. One berry was discovered trying to hide itself under half a bale of straw one morning, and while I was looking for Mrs. Idiot, to ask her to come down to the garden and see it grow, a miserable robin came along and bit its whole interior out. I hope the bird enjoyed it, because on a bed-rock estimate that berry cost twenty dollars. That is one of the things about gardening that make me especially weary. One doesn't mind spending forty-four dollars on a stalk of asparagus that is eaten, even surreptitiously, by a member of one's own family; but to pay twenty dollars for a strawberry to be wasted on a fifteen-cent robin is, to say the least, irritating."

"You forget, John," said Mrs. Idiot, with a somewhat mirthful look in her eyes, "that we got fifteen boxes out of the strawberry-patch later."

"No, I don't," said the Idiot. "I was coming to that, and it involves a confession. You were so blue about the loss of our one beautiful berry that I entered into a conspiracy with Michael to make that patch yield. The fifteen boxes 

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