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attract, and please, and beautify, we reap the reward of our efforts. Happy is the man who can point his friends to a lovely home and say--"I have done what I could to make it what it is. I have done it--not the professional who goes about the country making what he calls homes at so much a day, or by the job." The home that somebody has made for us never appeals to us as does the one into which we have put ourselves. Bear that in mind, and be wise, O friend of mine, and be your own home-maker.
Few of us could plan out the Home Beautiful, at the beginning, if we were to undertake to do so. There may be a mind-picture of it as we think we would like it to be, but we lack the knowledge by which such results as we have in mind are to be secured. Therefore we must be content to begin in a humble way, and let the work we undertake show us what to do next, as it progresses. We may never attain to the degree of knowledge that would make us successful if we were to set ourselves up as professional gardeners, but it doesn't matter much about that, since that is not what we have in mind when we begin the work of home-making. We are simply working by slow and easy steps toward an ideal which we may never realize, but the ideal is constantly before us to urge us on, and the home-instinct actuates us in all our efforts to make the place in which we live so beautiful that it will have for those we love, and those who may come after us, a charm that no other place on earth will ever have until the time comes when they take up the work of home-making for themselves.
[Illustration: PILLAR-TRAINED VINES]
The man or woman who begins the improvement and the beautifying of the home as a sort of recreation, as so many do, will soon feel the thrill of the delightful occupation, and be inspired to greater undertakings than he dreamed of at the beginning. One of the charms of home-making is that it grows upon you, and before you are aware of it that which was begun withou