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[[underline]] For Prize Contest [[/underline]]
[[handwritten and circled]] 707 [[/handwritten and circled]]
[[right justified]] Tujunga, California.
Route 1, Box 599.
July 1924. [[/right justified]]

W. Atlee Burpee Co.,
Philadelphia,Pa.

Gentlemen:

What your seeds have done for me the enclosed snap-shots testify, though inadequately.

"How d'you do it?" neighbors query, admiring our teeming quarter-acre while buying our produce.

"Burpee's seed-- intensive cultivation.  That's the secret," quoth I.  "Try it!"

The quick response of "seeds that grow" proves an ever new delight,-fosters [[underline]] my [[/underline]] growth too.  Through observing what plants live and thrive by, I learn [[underline]] what men live by [[/underline]], for gardening brings us [[underline]] near the heart of things. [[/underline]]  Here indeed are [[underline]] true values [[/underline]]:- childhood's happy hunting-ground, wide horizons of freedom and promise, easement of pain, creative joy, involving no man's sorrow or oppression.

Someday, my boys along with me, I'll climb atop these marvellous [[sic]] Verdugo Hills, and this to them I'll say:  "Far off, beyond the glittering plain and purple mountains, are high romance, adventure, ambitious strivings, far-flung battle-lines of triumph and disaster-- the stuff-of-life that beckons Youth.  Should you survive that larger testing ground, you still may find embodied in our simple, unpretentious garden-home, the [[underline]] nurture and foundation of it all [[/underline]]-- the love, the service, the binding up of wounds, the peace that saith, 'I am satisfied.'"

Seed-wisely yours,
[[signed]] J. E. Moate, [[/signed]] [[printed]] J. E. Moate. [[/printed]]