It is useless to plant cherry-stones in the hope of eating the fruit, because they don’t!
Alice won’t lend her gardening tools again, because the last time Noel left them out in the rain, and I don’t like it. He said he didn’t.
—————— SEEDS AND BULBS
These are useful to play at shop with, until you are ready. Not at dinner-parties, for they will not grow unless uncooked. Potatoes are not grown with seed, but with chopped-up potatoes. Apple trees are grown from twigs, which is less wasteful.
Oak trees come from acorns. Every one knows this. When Noel says he could grow one from a peach stone wrapped up in oak leaves, he shows that he knows nothing about gardening but marigolds, and when I passed by his garden I thought they seemed just like weeds now the flowers have been picked.
A boy once dared me to eat a bulb.
Dogs are very industrious and fond of gardening. Pincher is always planting bones, but they never grow up. There couldn’t be a bone tree. I think this is what makes him bark so unhappily at night. He has never tried planting dog-biscuit, but he is fonder of bones, and perhaps he wants to be quite sure about them first.
—————— SAM REDFERN, OR THE BUSHRANGER’S BURIAL
By Dicky
—————— CHAPTER IV AND LAST
This would have been a jolly good story if they had let me finish it at the beginning of the paper as I wanted to. But now I have forgotten how I meant it to end, and I have lost my book about Red Indians, and all my Boys of England have been sneaked. The girls say ‘Good riddance!’ so I expect they did it. They want me just to put in which Annie married, but I shan’t, so they will never know.
We have now put everything we can think of into the paper. It takes a lot of thinking about. I don’t know how grown-ups manage to write all they do. It must make their heads ache, especially lesson books.