Norwich bulletin., 1915-12-02

She says that she simply must get to work slipping geraniums before the frost nips them. and will bring up the flowers pots from the basement?
 After that for a week the front porch and the back porch are impen- etrable wildernesses of flower pots, trowels, earth, oats and debris. Why, the oats are to stick in the end of the get scattered on the lawn, and each spring I have fine young crop to harvest where I don't want it.
 Tt always rains when my wife slips geraniums. too, and I come home in the dark and tramp through muss kup the hall rugs so they have to go to the cleaners again.
 Then she plants bulbs and seeds and things. She says a home Is so much more attractive filled with beau ttful plants, and she can't see why from the top shelf of my closet any time after the onset of October, I in variably pull down two large flat bowls full of stones, water and tulip terrible. While I am searching for arnica and witch-hazel for my wounded skull she is gathering the bulbs and saying what an awful shame just when their roots were so nicely started! See. John. what cunning
 
 broken, every one, and she worked so hard getting them all fixed, and they would have been in full bloom by ChriStmasi
 Bitterly I point out to her that they never have been in full bloom at Christmas or any other time! AL ways those bulbs have grown and grown into regular forests. of leaves, but the flower buds either never came out or grew backward or otherwise sulked. Once a Chinese lily bulb ac- tually did bud and we had intense ex- citement in the family. but it blight ed.
 Besides, our house is not intended to grow plants in. None of the win dows gets the proper sun or air ex- cept at brief periods of the day, and my wife never has time to go out plants around from the library win dows to the kitchen and then up in to the guestroom.
 And when it gets real cold she has to put all the upstairs plants into the clothes closets at night because we raise the windows. If she forgets to do this when we come home late from a party she always wakens me an hour after I've fallen asleep and tragically tells me to hurry and put the plants safely away before they are quite frozen! I paddle around barefooted and acquire an expensive case of pneumonia and she finds in the morning that I've set the wettest flower pot on the train of her velvet reception gown hanging on a hook and she is very peevish for a week. Or else a fur coat falls on a geranium and smashes it.
 Those fool geraniums are the worst! They look like little Shang- hai roosters all winter, long stalks with a wad of leaves on top. There isn't a table to lay a book or paper on because the geraniufns are occu- pying them all. My wife is passion ately fond of geraniums! Blossoms Oh, no! No! We've never had a geranium slip blossom, and in the spring she has to throw them all away and buy new plants from the florist for the porch boxes. Never theless hope simply thrives and surges in her heart and she slips them every fall.
 I've got a scheme, though! I'm planning to walk backward into the biggest tableful and tip it over ker- smash. Then I shall borrow the rab- bit next door and turn it loose among the others and maybe I can throw down a morning paper when I'm through with it without causing her to shriek hysterically to look out, I'm hitting the house pianist I'm a des- perate man, I tell youl"
 You sure are some little sufferer" agreed the other man. What you want for a winter residence is a house without any windows at all!"-Chi- cago News.