Seasonable Hints

There seenas to be a growing taste for greenhouses, chieily, as"it would seem, for the purpose of having flowers at command all winter. Át this season the resolve is usually made by those who have none, to supply the luxury before the season is over. It is to be regretted that those who desire these pleasant attraetions to a home, do not get the opportunity of better advice in the building. We have seen many cases where the houses have had enormous arnountsof money spentontheni, tothe absolute obstruction of the main idea - plant-growing. Houses that would have been made models of beauty and very successful as plant houses, for $500, have been rendered uselesa by having $2,000 spent on them. The village carpenter, or the grand city architect or builder, have alike had their turn at greenhouse building ; the intelligent garden archiect is seldom given a chance. But here again we think the intelligent gardener misses it, innot more generally studying these outeide branches in connection with ttie practical parts of his profession. There is room for such men in every large city and town in the United States. A florist, who is at once a good nurseryman and an intelligent gentleman in every sense o" theword - who could at once grow plants, teil all about them, design a dwelling house or horticultirral building, makeroads, and have a good knowledge of the correct principies of art and taste- would soon be among the wealthy leaders of society in any. district, provided he has ordinary business tact added to his intellectual accomplishments. In learning these things cornmon sense is of more importance than scholastic training. The one who can proflt by experience, is more rapidly on the road to success than the one who spends a year at college. Passing through a greenhouse recently, in an establishment under the charge of a very good gardener, a workman was found at work putting down a mortar floor. The other, which had been down but two years, was worn out. It never occurred to the excellent gardener to. proflt by this ex perience. Mortar is the result of crystalization, and anything of this nature readily fractures under a sudden blow. Mortar floors will therefore soon wear out under the heels of pedestrians. But a lime floor is a different thing from a rtortar floor. The lime must slack whoïly under water, so that there is no chance to heat so as to engender crystalization. When mixed with three or four times its bulk of sand, so as to make a gort of limy mud, and then rolled with a heavy roller several times while drying, so as to press out every partiële of air, we have a floor hard as iron that will never crumble under the feet. Then as to mortar itself. Even the average mason does not know how to make it, and the gardener should be able to teil him how to do it. Here we want crystallization, and only water enough should be given to raise the heat in the lime, and the sand should be added while the linie is slacking. Perhaps half the mortar in use, even by good rnasoDs, rarely hardens. The clay or dirt in the sand gonerally gets the blanae, hut it is rather ignorance of the laws of crystalization. Again, in regard to walls. One has perhaps to be built up against a bank. The earth on the back of the bank may be soft and admit water. A mortar wall is built against it. The mortar being little else than piaster, absorbs water. This freezes and the mortar expands. Then the wall falls down. The good gardener learns a lesson. The next time he has a dry wall built - that is to say, one without any mortar - and he never after this puts up a mortar wall against soft earth. But the man who cannot learn- the one who wonders why that stupid fellow gets along, and he, pooi', hard-working fellow, never thrives - he builds up the mortar wall justas before, until bad luck throws it down again. llecently the writer saw another very good fellow in his way, stopping up with cement a crack in a brick flue. Ile had ot'ten done it before. He had nevei learned to do it once for all. There was the crack, and he plastered a quarter of an inch all over it. It cracked, and will crack again. If ho had made the small crack a large one, so that he could have pushed the cement right into it - a solid mass in the crack instead of a thin skin over it - his work would have been done for all time. Again, there is tbe man who is always haviug trouble with his cistern. He has nine-inch brick work, all laid in cement, and he has a quarter of an inch thick of cement all over the bricks, but he was ''cheated, sir, in that cement. It must have been badly adulterated, to leak as it is always doing." That man will never learn, but the one who profited by his first bad experience that leakages were f rom two causes-the one f rom porosity, and the other from unequal contraction, will. He tries to make the coating thoroughly dense, so as to close every pore, the thinDer the better, because there would be less likelihood of unequal contraction in drying. So the uext time he does not care whether the bricks are in cement or not, or whether there be any bricks at all as long as there is some rough surface to dash his cement against. Then he puts his cement made with water, as thin as cream, and works it with a plasterer's tuwel till every partiële of air is pressed out, and then he has a surface of cement as hard and as smooth as polished glass. Indeed, he learns tliat unless he could almost see to shave in the wall of his cistern, the work has been very poorly done.