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This portrait shows the Rt. Hon. Joseph Chamberlain as he generally appears. namely, with his monocle, but without the accustomed accompaniment of an orchid buttonhole bouquet. Mr. Chamberlain is now sixty-three years old. but he looks at least ten years younger. His early career was that of a merchant and a manufacturer. His entry on politics was coincident with the revolt of political dissenters against official Liberalism. He was thrice Mayor of Birming ham, and thrice married. The present Mrs. Chamberlain is an American, the daughter of ex-Secretary Endicott. Twenty years ago Mr. Chamberlain was an ardent supporter of Gladstone's domestic and foreign policy. While Mr. Chamber lain was even then no Little Englander, he was not the Imperialist he is to-day. When he entered Parliament, and when he became a Cabinet member, he espoused the cause of the Boers, and later the justice of the Anglo-Boer Conventions which his chief had signed. It must be admitted, however, that, though he defended the Conventions, Mr. Chamberlain also defended Bechuanaland, and thus prevented the Boers from doubling their territory. When Gladstone became a Home Ruler, Mr. Chamberlain wavered for a moment, and then became a Unionist. In those troublous times, as now, when, as Colonial Secretary, he is a member of a Unionist Coalition Cabinet, his coolness and cutting sarcasm in debate made him perhaps the man most feared in the House of Commons.

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Stephanus Johannes Paulus Kruger

No

President Kruger says of his early days: "I never had a chance to read books; I was always campaigning or fighting lions." When asked, in the light of present events, which he preferred, African or British lions, he replied: choice. They are both bad." He himself, however, has justly been called a slumbering lion. In physical appearance he stands six feet high, and has long legs, which must needs be long indeed if he once outran a fast horse for several He has also been a mighty horseman. His friends hundred yards, as they say. aver that, in hunting, if his saddle-girth ever snapped, he threw the saddle off while in motion, and continued the chase bareback. They add that he used to stand on his head in the saddle while his horse galloped, he holding on to the "Oom Paul," as the Boers love to call him, is very religious. stirrup-straps. Curiously enough, he was confirmed by an American missionary. The Bible is At the head of quite likely the only book he has read thoroughly. That he knows from beginning to end, and has a text for every circumstance in life.

his grazing, pasturing fold, he seems like an Old Testament patriarch. At first After sight he is not a particularly impressive person in his clumsy stovepipe hat and his misshapen coat and trousers, out of which come hands and feet of huge size, the whole an environment for ears, mouth, and chin also of huge size. this preparation, however, the smallness of his head is as disappointing as is the shortsightedness of his unprogressive political policy; and the Outlanders say that the stolidity of his manner is only equaled in exasperation by the bigotry of that policy. The stolid manner may be emphasized by the fact that the President smokes constantly. As a boy, Mr. Kruger left Cape Town with All his life has been a struggle for independence, the Great Trek of 1836.

and it has been a brave life.

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gardens.

AN AMERICAN GARDEN

By J. Horace McFarland

Illustrated from Photographs by the Author

HAT else is a garden in America? Yet there are in our broad land not many real American Few realize that the trend of rural decoration and lawn adornment in our country has been, for the most part, distinctly imitative of European forms. It was natural that our forefathers, when they began, as Bacon puts it, to "garden wisely," should look for models to their old homes across the Atlantic. In England and on the Continent the adornment of public and private grounds summed up generally as gardening is the growth of centuries of living beyond the struggle for mere existence. It has its distinctive and ripened character, and its materials are quite naturally those of the Eastern hemisphere. True, American plants were introduced in Europe long before the Revolutionary War, and such gentle souls as John Bartram sent to the home lands many members of the distinctively American flora in the last century; but the home gardening sought mainly to introduce the plant life of the older countries. Thus there were brought in and cultivated many familiar plants which are hardly now recognized as foreigners the geraniums, heliotropes, tulips, fuchsias, of the flower garden, the Norway maples, lindens, and European ashes of the parks.

This growing gardening art became more and more formal, and some quaint old examples of that extreme cultivated barbarism called "Italian gardening," with its clipped and sheared yews and box-trees, yet survive among us. The free, open, hearty plant life of America was practically unknown to us a century ago, in a decorative sense. The pioneers saw little beauty in the wild tangle of the woodlands they had to cut off for home sites, and the rich flora of the meadows and marshes must be subdued to make pastures. The pets of the housewife in her dooryard, when she came to have time for flowers, were exotic strangers, tenderly nourished, and she exchanged

with her neighbors "slips" of the rarer foreign treasures.

But our European cousins have helped to show us the glory of our own woods and hills, and discovered for us the gems of our meadows and roadsides. Many an estate in England exhibits as its chief glory a planting of American laurel and rhododendron; and the ubiquitous American tourist learns with astonishment that the common bushes and weeds of his generous home land are esteemed as rarely beautiful abroad.

Our greater landscape artists have begun to realize the possibilities of America's wealth of distinctive plant life. The

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Wooded Island at the World's Fair, and the great Vanderbilt estate in North Carolina, have furnished notable object-lessons. It is a smaller but most interesting example that I ask the reader to visit with me, a camera fixing for us a few impressions. Dolobran, near Philadelphia, is the country home of Mr. Clement A. Griscom. Differing little, as approached by the Haverford road, from other well-kept suburban residences, its broad lawns and fine effects in massed foliage show merely the correct taste of the landscape archiIt is not until one passes the gate way of the chestnuts that the distinctively American garden is entered, and the free beauty of native woodland, marsh, and copse presents itself.

tect.

What a change! Here is no tailormade lawn! No geranium-beds or coleus borders of monotonously continuous coloring meet the eye; no "carpet gardening'. of mosaic plants offends the taste. Just the natural beauty of American plants, located cunningly where they love to grow, unrestrained, untrimmed. True, the plants are cared for-fed, if need be, watered on occasion-but no attempt is made to guide them into preconceived forms.

It was said of Thoreau-he who loved and lived with American flora and fauna far ahead of his generation-that he could hardly keep away from him the usually shy denizens of the forest about Walden pond. In a measure, this seems to be the feeling of the plants in this American garden which Mr. Griscom's liberality has created-the plants fairly outdo themselves in repayment of the love lavished upon them. See the richness of this great white boneset-it is actually the same herb of bitter memory to the youth of a passing generation, and it is a despised roadside weed elsewhere. Here its majestic spread of bloom in September excites our wonder and admiration. A sister eupatorium, the "joe-pyeweed," throws up its purple richness in company.

In this garden the changes are quick. We visit it on a spring morning, and greet, freshly bloomed, a dozen friends of last year. We come back in the afternoon, and the curtain has risen on a new scene. One of the charms of the native plants is their evanescence. You look for their first appearance, you watch the growth of the tender shoots, you greet the shy blos

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