PREFACE
Dear Boys and Girls:
Mary Frances and Billy have been growing up, and with their growing, they have learned to love the great out-of-doors.
No, they haven’t outgrown fairy folk, at least Mary Frances hasn’t, for that is a part of this story—how Feather Flop, the rooster, and Jack-in-the-Pulpit and Bouncing Bet, the fairies of the wood, helped teach her to garden.
But in their study and work, Mary Frances and Billy learned more than that—they learned to appreciate what a wonderful amount of energy is expended by Mother Nature in growing one little plant from a seed; how careful she is that nothing be wasted; and what pleasure there is in tilling the soil, and helping things grow!
Everything else in the Mary Frances stories had to do with indoors: in cooking, feeding the body; in sewing, clothing the body; in housekeeping, sheltering the body. In gardening, which took them out-of-doors, the children had so much fun and had so much to learn, that the whole story cannot be put down here—you must finish it out for yourselves in your own gardens.
That you, too, may learn to help things grow, and share the pleasure which Mary Frances and Billy, and their friends, Eleanor and Bob, had in making a garden, is the wish of
Merchantville, N. J.