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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Summer in a Garden, and Calvin,
+A Study Of Character, by Charles Dudley Warner
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Summer in a Garden, and Calvin, A Study Of Character
+
+Author: Charles Dudley Warner
+
+Release Date: August 20, 2016 [EBook #3135]
+Last Updated: February 24, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SUMMER IN A GARDEN ***
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+SUMMER IN A GARDEN
+
+and
+
+CALVIN, A STUDY OF CHARACTER
+
+
+By Charles Dudley Warner
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTORY LETTER
+
+MY DEAR MR. FIELDS,--I did promise to write an Introduction to these
+charming papers but an Introduction,--what is it?--a sort of pilaster,
+put upon the face of a building for looks' sake, and usually flat,--very
+flat. Sometimes it may be called a caryatid, which is, as I understand
+it, a cruel device of architecture, representing a man or a woman,
+obliged to hold up upon his or her head or shoulders a structure which
+they did not build, and which could stand just as well without as with
+them. But an Introduction is more apt to be a pillar, such as one may
+see in Baalbec, standing up in the air all alone, with nothing on it,
+and with nothing for it to do.
+
+But an Introductory Letter is different. There is in that no formality,
+no assumption of function, no awkward propriety or dignity to be
+sustained. A letter at the opening of a book may be only a footpath,
+leading the curious to a favorable point of observation, and then
+leaving them to wander as they will.
+
+Sluggards have been sent to the ant for wisdom; but writers might better
+be sent to the spider, not because he works all night, and watches all
+day, but because he works unconsciously. He dare not even bring his work
+before his own eyes, but keeps it behind him, as if too much knowledge
+of what one is doing would spoil the delicacy and modesty of one's work.
+
+Almost all graceful and fanciful work is born like a dream, that comes
+noiselessly, and tarries silently, and goes as a bubble bursts. And yet
+somewhere work must come in,--real, well-considered work.
+
+Inness (the best American painter of Nature in her moods of real human
+feeling) once said, “No man can do anything in art, unless he has
+intuitions; but, between whiles, one must work hard in collecting the
+materials out of which intuitions are made.” The truth could not be hit
+off better. Knowledge is the soil, and intuitions are the flowers which
+grow up out of it. The soil must be well enriched and worked.
+
+It is very plain, or will be to those who read these papers, now
+gathered up into this book, as into a chariot for a race, that the
+author has long employed his eyes, his ears, and his understanding, in
+observing and considering the facts of Nature, and in weaving curious
+analogies. Being an editor of one of the oldest daily news-papers in New
+England, and obliged to fill its columns day after day (as the village
+mill is obliged to render every day so many sacks of flour or of meal
+to its hungry customers), it naturally occurred to him, “Why not write
+something which I myself, as well as my readers, shall enjoy? The
+market gives them facts enough; politics, lies enough; art, affectations
+enough; criminal news, horrors enough; fashion, more than enough of
+vanity upon vanity, and vexation of purse. Why should they not have some
+of those wandering and joyous fancies which solace my hours?”
+
+The suggestion ripened into execution. Men and women read, and wanted
+more. These garden letters began to blossom every week; and many hands
+were glad to gather pleasure from them. A sign it was of wisdom. In our
+feverish days it is a sign of health or of convalescence that men love
+gentle pleasure, and enjoyments that do not rush or roar, but distill as
+the dew.
+
+The love of rural life, the habit of finding enjoyment in familiar
+things, that susceptibility to Nature which keeps the nerve gently
+thrilled in her homliest nooks and by her commonest sounds, is worth a
+thousand fortunes of money, or its equivalents.
+
+Every book which interprets the secret lore of fields and gardens, every
+essay that brings men nearer to the understanding of the mysteries which
+every tree whispers, every brook murmurs, every weed, even, hints, is
+a contribution to the wealth and the happiness of our kind. And if the
+lines of the writer shall be traced in quaint characters, and be filled
+with a grave humor, or break out at times into merriment, all this will
+be no presumption against their wisdom or his goodness. Is the oak less
+strong and tough because the mosses and weather-stains stick in all
+manner of grotesque sketches along its bark? Now, truly, one may not
+learn from this little book either divinity or horticulture; but if he
+gets a pure happiness, and a tendency to repeat the happiness from the
+simple stores of Nature, he will gain from our friend's garden what Adam
+lost in his, and what neither philosophy nor divinity has always been
+able to restore.
+
+Wherefore, thanking you for listening to a former letter, which begged
+you to consider whether these curious and ingenious papers, that go
+winding about like a half-trodden path between the garden and the field,
+might not be given in book-form to your million readers, I remain, yours
+to command in everything but the writing of an Introduction,
+
+HENRY WARD BEECHER.
+
+
+
+
+
+BY WAY OF DEDICATION
+
+MY DEAR POLLY,--When a few of these papers had appeared in “The
+Courant,” I was encouraged to continue them by hearing that they had at
+least one reader who read them with the serious mind from which alone
+profit is to be expected. It was a maiden lady, who, I am sure, was no
+more to blame for her singleness than for her age; and she looked to
+these honest sketches of experience for that aid which the professional
+agricultural papers could not give in the management of the little bit
+of garden which she called her own. She may have been my only disciple;
+and I confess that the thought of her yielding a simple faith to what a
+gainsaying world may have regarded with levity has contributed much
+to give an increased practical turn to my reports of what I know about
+gardening. The thought that I had misled a lady, whose age is not her
+only singularity, who looked to me for advice which should be not at all
+the fanciful product of the Garden of Gull, would give me great pain. I
+trust that her autumn is a peaceful one, and undisturbed by either the
+humorous or the satirical side of Nature.
+
+You know that this attempt to tell the truth about one of the most
+fascinating occupations in the world has not been without its dangers. I
+have received anonymous letters. Some of them were murderously spelled;
+others were missives in such elegant phrase and dress, that danger
+was only to be apprehended in them by one skilled in the mysteries of
+medieval poisoning, when death flew on the wings of a perfume. One lady,
+whose entreaty that I should pause had something of command in it, wrote
+that my strictures on “pusley” had so inflamed her husband's zeal,
+that, in her absence in the country, he had rooted up all her beds of
+portulaca (a sort of cousin of the fat weed), and utterly cast it out.
+It is, however, to be expected, that retributive justice would visit
+the innocent as well as the guilty of an offending family. This is only
+another proof of the wide sweep of moral forces. I suppose that it is
+as necessary in the vegetable world as it is elsewhere to avoid the
+appearance of evil.
+
+In offering you the fruit of my garden, which has been gathered from
+week to week, without much reference to the progress of the crops or the
+drought, I desire to acknowledge an influence which has lent half the
+charm to my labor. If I were in a court of justice, or injustice, under
+oath, I should not like to say, that, either in the wooing days of
+spring, or under the suns of the summer solstice, you had been, either
+with hoe, rake, or miniature spade, of the least use in the garden; but
+your suggestions have been invaluable, and, whenever used, have been
+paid for. Your horticultural inquiries have been of a nature to astonish
+the vegetable world, if it listened, and were a constant inspiration to
+research. There was almost nothing that you did not wish to know;
+and this, added to what I wished to know, made a boundless field for
+discovery. What might have become of the garden, if your advice had been
+followed, a good Providence only knows; but I never worked there without
+a consciousness that you might at any moment come down the walk, under
+the grape-arbor, bestowing glances of approval, that were none the
+worse for not being critical; exercising a sort of superintendence that
+elevated gardening into a fine art; expressing a wonder that was as
+complimentary to me as it was to Nature; bringing an atmosphere which
+made the garden a region of romance, the soil of which was set apart for
+fruits native to climes unseen. It was this bright presence that filled
+the garden, as it did the summer, with light, and now leaves upon it
+that tender play of color and bloom which is called among the Alps the
+after-glow.
+
+NOOK FARM, HARTFORD, October, 1870
+
+C. D. W.
+
+
+
+
+
+PRELIMINARY
+
+
+The love of dirt is among the earliest of passions, as it is the latest.
+Mud-pies gratify one of our first and best instincts. So long as we are
+dirty, we are pure. Fondness for the ground comes back to a man after
+he has run the round of pleasure and business, eaten dirt, and sown
+wild-oats, drifted about the world, and taken the wind of all its
+moods. The love of digging in the ground (or of looking on while he pays
+another to dig) is as sure to come back to him as he is sure, at last,
+to go under the ground, and stay there. To own a bit of ground, to
+scratch it with a hoe, to plant seeds and watch, their renewal of life,
+this is the commonest delight of the race, the most satisfactory thing
+a man can do. When Cicero writes of the pleasures of old age, that of
+agriculture is chief among them:
+
+“Venio nunc ad voluptates agricolarum, quibus ego incredibiliter
+delector: quae nec ulla impediuntur senectute, et mihi ad sapientis
+vitam proxime videntur accedere.” (I am driven to Latin because New York
+editors have exhausted the English language in the praising of spring,
+and especially of the month of May.)
+
+Let us celebrate the soil. Most men toil that they may own a piece of
+it; they measure their success in life by their ability to buy it. It is
+alike the passion of the parvenu and the pride of the aristocrat. Broad
+acres are a patent of nobility; and no man but feels more, of a man in
+the world if he have a bit of ground that he can call his own. However
+small it is on the surface, it is four thousand miles deep; and that is
+a very handsome property. And there is a great pleasure in working in
+the soil, apart from the ownership of it. The man who has planted a
+garden feels that he has done something for the good of the World. He
+belongs to the producers. It is a pleasure to eat of the fruit of one's
+toil, if it be nothing more than a head of lettuce or an ear of corn.
+One cultivates a lawn even with great satisfaction; for there is nothing
+more beautiful than grass and turf in our latitude. The tropics may have
+their delights, but they have not turf: and the world without turf is a
+dreary desert. The original Garden of Eden could not have had such turf
+as one sees in England. The Teutonic races all love turf: they emigrate
+in the line of its growth.
+
+To dig in the mellow soil-to dig moderately, for all pleasure should be
+taken sparingly--is a great thing. One gets strength out of the ground
+as often as one really touches it with a hoe. Antaeus (this is
+a classical article) was no doubt an agriculturist; and such a
+prize-fighter as Hercules could n't do anything with him till he got
+him to lay down his spade, and quit the soil. It is not simply beets
+and potatoes and corn and string-beans that one raises in his well-hoed
+garden: it is the average of human life. There is life in the ground; it
+goes into the seeds; and it also, when it is stirred up, goes into the
+man who stirs it. The hot sun on his back as he bends to his shovel and
+hoe, or contemplatively rakes the warm and fragrant loam, is better than
+much medicine. The buds are coming out on the bushes round about; the
+blossoms of the fruit trees begin to show; the blood is running up the
+grapevines in streams; you can smell the Wild flowers on the near bank;
+and the birds are flying and glancing and singing everywhere. To the
+open kitchen door comes the busy housewife to shake a white something,
+and stands a moment to look, quite transfixed by the delightful sights
+and sounds. Hoeing in the garden on a bright, soft May day, when you are
+not obliged to, is nearly equal to the delight of going trouting.
+
+Blessed be agriculture! if one does not have too much of it. All
+literature is fragrant with it, in a gentlemanly way. At the foot of the
+charming olive-covered hills of Tivoli, Horace (not he of Chappaqua)
+had a sunny farm: it was in sight of Hadrian's villa, who did landscape
+gardening on an extensive scale, and probably did not get half as much
+comfort out of it as Horace did from his more simply tilled acres. We
+trust that Horace did a little hoeing and farming himself, and that his
+verse is not all fraudulent sentiment. In order to enjoy agriculture,
+you do not want too much of it, and you want to be poor enough to have
+a little inducement to work moderately yourself. Hoe while it is spring,
+and enjoy the best anticipations. It is not much matter if things do not
+turn out well.
+
+
+
+
+FIRST WEEK
+
+Under this modest title, I purpose to write a series of papers, some of
+which will be like many papers of garden-seeds, with nothing vital in
+them, on the subject of gardening; holding that no man has any right to
+keep valuable knowledge to himself, and hoping that those who come after
+me, except tax-gatherers and that sort of person, will find profit in
+the perusal of my experience. As my knowledge is constantly increasing,
+there is likely to be no end to these papers. They will pursue no
+orderly system of agriculture or horticulture, but range from topic to
+topic, according to the weather and the progress of the weeds, which may
+drive me from one corner of the garden to the other.
+
+The principal value of a private garden is not understood. It is not to
+give the possessor vegetables or fruit (that can be better and cheaper
+done by the market-gardeners), but to teach him patience and philosophy
+and the higher virtues, hope deferred and expectations blighted, leading
+directly to resignation and sometimes to alienation. The garden thus
+becomes a moral agent, a test of character, as it was in the beginning.
+I shall keep this central truth in mind in these articles. I mean to
+have a moral garden, if it is not a productive one,--one that shall
+teach, O my brothers! O my sisters! the great lessons of life.
+
+The first pleasant thing about a garden in this latitude is, that
+you never know when to set it going. If you want anything to come to
+maturity early, you must start it in a hot-house. If you put it out
+early, the chances are all in favor of getting it nipped with frost; for
+the thermometer will be 90 deg. one day, and go below 32 deg. the night
+of the day following. And, if you do not set out plants or sow seeds
+early, you fret continually; knowing that your vegetables will be
+late, and that, while Jones has early peas, you will be watching your
+slow-forming pods. This keeps you in a state of mind. When you have
+planted anything early, you are doubtful whether to desire to see it
+above ground, or not. If a hot day comes, you long to see the young
+plants; but, when a cold north wind brings frost, you tremble lest the
+seeds have burst their bands. Your spring is passed in anxious doubts
+and fears, which are usually realized; and so a great moral discipline
+is worked out for you.
+
+Now, there is my corn, two or three inches high this 18th of May, and
+apparently having no fear of a frost. I was hoeing it this morning for
+the first time,--it is not well usually to hoe corn until about the 18th
+of May,--when Polly came out to look at the Lima beans. She seemed to
+think the poles had come up beautifully. I thought they did look well:
+they are a fine set of poles, large and well grown, and stand straight.
+They were inexpensive, too. The cheapness came about from my cutting
+them on another man's land, and he did not know it. I have not examined
+this transaction in the moral light of gardening; but I know people in
+this country take great liberties at the polls. Polly noticed that the
+beans had not themselves come up in any proper sense, but that the dirt
+had got off from them, leaving them uncovered. She thought it would be
+well to sprinkle a slight layer of dirt over them; and I, indulgently,
+consented. It occurred to me, when she had gone, that beans always come
+up that way,--wrong end first; and that what they wanted was light, and
+not dirt.
+
+Observation.--Woman always did, from the first, make a muss in a garden.
+
+I inherited with my garden a large patch of raspberries. Splendid berry
+the raspberry, when the strawberry has gone. This patch has grown into
+such a defiant attitude, that you could not get within several feet of
+it. Its stalks were enormous in size, and cast out long, prickly arms in
+all directions; but the bushes were pretty much all dead. I have walked
+into them a good deal with a pruning-knife; but it is very much like
+fighting original sin. The variety is one that I can recommend. I think
+it is called Brinckley's Orange. It is exceedingly prolific, and has
+enormous stalks. The fruit is also said to be good; but that does not
+matter so much, as the plant does not often bear in this region. The
+stalks seem to be biennial institutions; and as they get about their
+growth one year, and bear the next year, and then die, and the winters
+here nearly always kill them, unless you take them into the house (which
+is inconvenient if you have a family of small children), it is very
+difficult to induce the plant to flower and fruit. This is the greatest
+objection there is to this sort of raspberry. I think of keeping these
+for discipline, and setting out some others, more hardy sorts, for
+fruit.
+
+
+
+
+SECOND WEEK
+
+Next to deciding when to start your garden, the most important matter
+is, what to put in it. It is difficult to decide what to order for
+dinner on a given day: how much more oppressive is it to order in a lump
+an endless vista of dinners, so to speak! For, unless your garden is a
+boundless prairie (and mine seems to me to be that when I hoe it on hot
+days), you must make a selection, from the great variety of vegetables,
+of those you will raise in it; and you feel rather bound to supply your
+own table from your own garden, and to eat only as you have sown.
+
+I hold that no man has a right (whatever his sex, of course) to have
+a garden to his own selfish uses. He ought not to please himself, but
+every man to please his neighbor. I tried to have a garden that would
+give general moral satisfaction. It seemed to me that nobody could
+object to potatoes (a most useful vegetable); and I began to plant them
+freely. But there was a chorus of protest against them. “You don't want
+to take up your ground with potatoes,” the neighbors said; “you can buy
+potatoes” (the very thing I wanted to avoid doing is buying things).
+“What you want is the perishable things that you cannot get fresh in
+the market.”--“But what kind of perishable things?” A horticulturist of
+eminence wanted me to sow lines of straw-berries and raspberries right
+over where I had put my potatoes in drills. I had about five hundred
+strawberry-plants in another part of my garden; but this fruit-fanatic
+wanted me to turn my whole patch into vines and runners. I suppose I
+could raise strawberries enough for all my neighbors; and
+perhaps I ought to do it. I had a little space prepared for
+melons,--muskmelons,--which I showed to an experienced friend.
+
+“You are not going to waste your ground on muskmelons?” he asked. “They
+rarely ripen in this climate thoroughly, before frost.” He had tried for
+years without luck. I resolved to not go into such a foolish experiment.
+But, the next day, another neighbor happened in. “Ah! I see you are
+going to have melons. My family would rather give up anything else in
+the garden than musk-melons,--of the nutmeg variety. They are the most
+grateful things we have on the table.” So there it was. There was no
+compromise: it was melons, or no melons, and somebody offended in any
+case. I half resolved to plant them a little late, so that they would,
+and they would n't. But I had the same difficulty about string-beans
+(which I detest), and squash (which I tolerate), and parsnips, and the
+whole round of green things.
+
+I have pretty much come to the conclusion that you have got to put your
+foot down in gardening. If I had actually taken counsel of my friends, I
+should not have had a thing growing in the garden to-day but weeds. And
+besides, while you are waiting, Nature does not wait. Her mind is made
+up. She knows just what she will raise; and she has an infinite variety
+of early and late. The most humiliating thing to me about a garden
+is the lesson it teaches of the inferiority of man. Nature is prompt,
+decided, inexhaustible. She thrusts up her plants with a vigor and
+freedom that I admire; and the more worthless the plant, the more rapid
+and splendid its growth. She is at it early and late, and all night;
+never tiring, nor showing the least sign of exhaustion.
+
+“Eternal gardening is the price of liberty,” is a motto that I should
+put over the gateway of my garden, if I had a gate. And yet it is
+not wholly true; for there is no liberty in gardening. The man who
+undertakes a garden is relentlessly pursued. He felicitates himself
+that, when he gets it once planted, he will have a season of rest and
+of enjoyment in the sprouting and growing of his seeds. It is a green
+anticipation. He has planted a seed that will keep him awake nights;
+drive rest from his bones, and sleep from his pillow. Hardly is the
+garden planted, when he must begin to hoe it. The weeds have sprung up
+all over it in a night. They shine and wave in redundant life. The docks
+have almost gone to seed; and their roots go deeper than conscience.
+Talk about the London Docks!--the roots of these are like the sources of
+the Aryan race. And the weeds are not all. I awake in the morning (and
+a thriving garden will wake a person up two hours before he ought to
+be out of bed) and think of the tomato-plants,--the leaves like fine
+lace-work, owing to black bugs that skip around, and can't be caught.
+Somebody ought to get up before the dew is off (why don't the dew stay
+on till after a reasonable breakfast?) and sprinkle soot on the leaves.
+I wonder if it is I. Soot is so much blacker than the bugs, that they
+are disgusted, and go away. You can't get up too early, if you have a
+garden. You must be early due yourself, if you get ahead of the bugs.
+I think, that, on the whole, it would be best to sit up all night,
+and sleep daytimes. Things appear to go on in the night in the garden
+uncommonly. It would be less trouble to stay up than it is to get up so
+early.
+
+I have been setting out some new raspberries, two sorts,--a silver and
+a gold color. How fine they will look on the table next year in a
+cut-glass dish, the cream being in a ditto pitcher! I set them four
+and five feet apart. I set my strawberries pretty well apart also. The
+reason is, to give room for the cows to run through when they break into
+the garden,--as they do sometimes. A cow needs a broader track than a
+locomotive; and she generally makes one. I am sometimes astonished,
+to see how big a space in, a flower-bed her foot will cover. The
+raspberries are called Doolittle and Golden Cap. I don't like the name
+of the first variety, and, if they do much, shall change it to Silver
+Top. You never can tell what a thing named Doolittle will do. The one
+in the Senate changed color, and got sour. They ripen badly,--either
+mildew, or rot on the bush. They are apt to Johnsonize,--rot on the
+stem. I shall watch the Doolittles.
+
+
+
+
+THIRD WEEK
+
+I believe that I have found, if not original sin, at least vegetable
+total depravity in my garden; and it was there before I went into it. It
+is the bunch, or joint, or snakegrass,--whatever it is called. As I do
+not know the names of all the weeds and plants, I have to do as Adam did
+in his garden,--name things as I find them. This grass has a slender,
+beautiful stalk: and when you cut it down, or pull up a long root of it,
+you fancy it is got rid of; but in a day or two it will come up in the
+same spot in half a dozen vigorous blades. Cutting down and pulling up
+is what it thrives on. Extermination rather helps it. If you follow a
+slender white root, it will be found to run under the ground until it
+meets another slender white root; and you will soon unearth a network
+of them, with a knot somewhere, sending out dozens of sharp-pointed,
+healthy shoots, every joint prepared to be an independent life and
+plant. The only way to deal with it is to take one part hoe and two
+parts fingers, and carefully dig it out, not leaving a joint anywhere.
+It will take a little time, say all summer, to dig out thoroughly a
+small patch; but if you once dig it out, and keep it out, you will have
+no further trouble.
+
+I have said it was total depravity. Here it is. If you attempt to pull
+up and root out any sin in you, which shows on the surface,--if it does
+not show, you do not care for it,--you may have noticed how it runs into
+an interior network of sins, and an ever-sprouting branch of them roots
+somewhere; and that you cannot pull out one without making a general
+internal disturbance, and rooting up your whole being. I suppose it is
+less trouble to quietly cut them off at the top--say once a week, on
+Sunday, when you put on your religious clothes and face so that no one
+will see them, and not try to eradicate the network within.
+
+Remark.--This moral vegetable figure is at the service of any clergyman
+who will have the manliness to come forward and help me at a day's
+hoeing on my potatoes. None but the orthodox need apply.
+
+I, however, believe in the intellectual, if not the moral, qualities of
+vegetables, and especially weeds. There was a worthless vine that
+(or who) started up about midway between a grape-trellis and a row of
+bean-poles, some three feet from each, but a little nearer the trellis.
+When it came out of the ground, it looked around to see what it should
+do. The trellis was already occupied. The bean-pole was empty. There
+was evidently a little the best chance of light, air, and sole
+proprietorship on the pole. And the vine started for the pole, and began
+to climb it with determination. Here was as distinct an act of choice,
+of reason, as a boy exercises when he goes into a forest, and, looking
+about, decides which tree he will climb. And, besides, how did the vine
+know enough to travel in exactly the right direction, three feet, to
+find what it wanted? This is intellect. The weeds, on the other hand,
+have hateful moral qualities. To cut down a weed is, therefore, to do
+a moral action. I feel as if I were destroying sin. My hoe becomes an
+instrument of retributive justice. I am an apostle of Nature. This view
+of the matter lends a dignity to the art of hoeing which nothing else
+does, and lifts it into the region of ethics. Hoeing becomes, not a
+pastime, but a duty. And you get to regard it so, as the days and the
+weeds lengthen.
+
+Observation.--Nevertheless, what a man needs in gardening is a
+cast-iron back,--with a hinge in it. The hoe is an ingenious instrument,
+calculated to call out a great deal of strength at a great disadvantage.
+
+The striped bug has come, the saddest of the year. He is a moral
+double-ender, iron-clad at that. He is unpleasant in two ways. He
+burrows in the ground so that you cannot find him, and he flies away
+so that you cannot catch him. He is rather handsome, as bugs go, but
+utterly dastardly, in that he gnaws the stem of the plant close to the
+ground, and ruins it without any apparent advantage to himself. I find
+him on the hills of cucumbers (perhaps it will be a cholera-year, and
+we shall not want any), the squashes (small loss), and the melons (which
+never ripen). The best way to deal with the striped bug is to sit down
+by the hills, and patiently watch for him. If you are spry, you can
+annoy him. This, however, takes time. It takes all day and part of the
+night. For he flieth in darkness, and wasteth at noonday. If you get
+up before the dew is off the plants,--it goes off very early,--you can
+sprinkle soot on the plant (soot is my panacea: if I can get the disease
+of a plant reduced to the necessity of soot, I am all right) and soot
+is unpleasant to the bug. But the best thing to do is to set a toad to
+catch the bugs. The toad at once establishes the most intimate relations
+with the bug. It is a pleasure to see such unity among the lower
+animals. The difficulty is to make the toad stay and watch the hill.
+If you know your toad, it is all right. If you do not, you must build
+a tight fence round the plants, which the toad cannot jump over. This,
+however, introduces a new element. I find that I have a zoological
+garden on my hands. It is an unexpected result of my little enterprise,
+which never aspired to the completeness of the Paris “Jardin des
+Plantes.”
+
+
+
+
+FOURTH WEEK
+
+Orthodoxy is at a low ebb. Only two clergymen accepted my offer to
+come and help hoe my potatoes for the privilege of using my vegetable
+total-depravity figure about the snake-grass, or quack-grass as some
+call it; and those two did not bring hoes. There seems to be a lack of
+disposition to hoe among our educated clergy. I am bound to say that
+these two, however, sat and watched my vigorous combats with the weeds,
+and talked most beautifully about the application of the snake-grass
+figure. As, for instance, when a fault or sin showed on the surface of a
+man, whether, if you dug down, you would find that it ran back and into
+the original organic bunch of original sin within the man. The only
+other clergyman who came was from out of town,--a half Universalist,
+who said he wouldn't give twenty cents for my figure. He said that the
+snake-grass was not in my garden originally, that it sneaked in under
+the sod, and that it could be entirely rooted out with industry and
+patience. I asked the Universalist-inclined man to take my hoe and try
+it; but he said he had n't time, and went away.
+
+But, jubilate, I have got my garden all hoed the first time! I feel as
+if I had put down the rebellion. Only there are guerrillas left here and
+there, about the borders and in corners, unsubdued,--Forrest docks,
+and Quantrell grass, and Beauregard pig-weeds. This first hoeing is
+a gigantic task: it is your first trial of strength with the
+never-sleeping forces of Nature. Several times, in its progress, I was
+tempted to do as Adam did, who abandoned his garden on account of the
+weeds. (How much my mind seems to run upon Adam, as if there had been
+only two really moral gardens,--Adam's and mine!) The only drawback to
+my rejoicing over the finishing of the first hoeing is, that the garden
+now wants hoeing the second time. I suppose, if my garden were planted
+in a perfect circle, and I started round it with a hoe, I should never
+see an opportunity to rest. The fact is, that gardening is the old fable
+of perpetual labor; and I, for one, can never forgive Adam Sisyphus, or
+whoever it was, who let in the roots of discord. I had pictured myself
+sitting at eve, with my family, in the shade of twilight, contemplating
+a garden hoed. Alas! it is a dream not to be realized in this world.
+
+My mind has been turned to the subject of fruit and shade trees in a
+garden. There are those who say that trees shade the garden too much,
+and interfere with the growth of the vegetables. There may be something
+in this: but when I go down the potato rows, the rays of the sun
+glancing upon my shining blade, the sweat pouring from my face, I should
+be grateful for shade. What is a garden for? The pleasure of man. I
+should take much more pleasure in a shady garden. Am I to be sacrificed,
+broiled, roasted, for the sake of the increased vigor of a few
+vegetables? The thing is perfectly absurd. If I were rich, I think
+I would have my garden covered with an awning, so that it would be
+comfortable to work in it. It might roll up and be removable, as the
+great awning of the Roman Coliseum was,--not like the Boston one, which
+went off in a high wind. Another very good way to do, and probably not
+so expensive as the awning, would be to have four persons of foreign
+birth carry a sort of canopy over you as you hoed. And there might be
+a person at each end of the row with some cool and refreshing drink.
+Agriculture is still in a very barbarous stage. I hope to live yet to
+see the day when I can do my gardening, as tragedy is done, to slow and
+soothing music, and attended by some of the comforts I have named. These
+things come so forcibly into my mind sometimes as I work, that perhaps,
+when a wandering breeze lifts my straw hat, or a bird lights on a near
+currant-bush, and shakes out a full-throated summer song, I almost
+expect to find the cooling drink and the hospitable entertainment at the
+end of the row. But I never do. There is nothing to be done but to turn
+round, and hoe back to the other end.
+
+Speaking of those yellow squash-bugs, I think I disheartened them by
+covering the plants so deep with soot and wood-ashes that they could not
+find them; and I am in doubt if I shall ever see the plants again. But
+I have heard of another defense against the bugs. Put a fine wire-screen
+over each hill, which will keep out the bugs and admit the rain. I
+should say that these screens would not cost much more than the melons
+you would be likely to get from the vines if you bought them; but then
+think of the moral satisfaction of watching the bugs hovering over the
+screen, seeing, but unable to reach the tender plants within. That is
+worth paying for.
+
+I left my own garden yesterday, and went over to where Polly was getting
+the weeds out of one of her flower-beds. She was working away at the bed
+with a little hoe. Whether women ought to have the ballot or not (and I
+have a decided opinion on that point, which I should here plainly give,
+did I not fear that it would injure my agricultural influence), 'I am
+compelled to say that this was rather helpless hoeing. It was patient,
+conscientious, even pathetic hoeing; but it was neither effective
+nor finished. When completed, the bed looked somewhat as if a hen had
+scratched it: there was that touching unevenness about it. I think no
+one could look at it and not be affected. To be sure, Polly smoothed it
+off with a rake, and asked me if it was n't nice; and I said it was.
+It was not a favorable time for me to explain the difference between
+puttering hoeing, and the broad, free sweep of the instrument, which
+kills the weeds, spares the plants, and loosens the soil without leaving
+it in holes and hills. But, after all, as life is constituted, I think
+more of Polly's honest and anxious care of her plants than of the most
+finished gardening in the world.
+
+
+
+
+FIFTH WEEK
+
+I left my garden for a week, just at the close of the dry spell.
+A season of rain immediately set in, and when I returned the
+transformation was wonderful. In one week every vegetable had fairly
+jumped forward. The tomatoes which I left slender plants, eaten of bugs
+and debating whether they would go backward or forward, had become
+stout and lusty, with thick stems and dark leaves, and some of them
+had blossomed. The corn waved like that which grows so rank out of the
+French-English mixture at Waterloo. The squashes--I will not speak of
+the squashes. The most remarkable growth was the asparagus. There was
+not a spear above ground when I went away; and now it had sprung up, and
+gone to seed, and there were stalks higher than my head. I am entirely
+aware of the value of words, and of moral obligations. When I say that
+the asparagus had grown six feet in seven days, I expect and wish to be
+believed. I am a little particular about the statement; for, if there is
+any prize offered for asparagus at the next agricultural fair, I wish to
+compete,--speed to govern. What I claim is the fastest asparagus. As for
+eating purposes, I have seen better. A neighbor of mine, who looked in
+at the growth of the bed, said, “Well, he'd be -----“: but I told him
+there was no use of affirming now; he might keep his oath till I wanted
+it on the asparagus affidavit. In order to have this sort of asparagus,
+you want to manure heavily in the early spring, fork it in, and
+top-dress (that sounds technical) with a thick layer of chloride of
+sodium: if you cannot get that, common salt will do, and the neighbors
+will never notice whether it is the orthodox Na. Cl. 58-5, or not.
+
+I scarcely dare trust myself to speak of the weeds. They grow as if the
+devil was in them. I know a lady, a member of the church, and a very
+good sort of woman, considering the subject condition of that class, who
+says that the weeds work on her to that extent, that, in going
+through her garden, she has the greatest difficulty in keeping the ten
+commandments in anything like an unfractured condition. I asked her
+which one, but she said, all of them: one felt like breaking the whole
+lot. The sort of weed which I most hate (if I can be said to hate
+anything which grows in my own garden) is the “pusley,” a fat,
+ground-clinging, spreading, greasy thing, and the most propagatious (it
+is not my fault if the word is not in the dictionary) plant I know. I
+saw a Chinaman, who came over with a returned missionary, and pretended
+to be converted, boil a lot of it in a pot, stir in eggs, and mix and
+eat it with relish,--“Me likee he.” It will be a good thing to keep the
+Chinamen on when they come to do our gardening. I only fear they will
+cultivate it at the expense of the strawberries and melons. Who can say
+that other weeds, which we despise, may not be the favorite food of some
+remote people or tribe? We ought to abate our conceit. It is possible
+that we destroy in our gardens that which is really of most value in
+some other place. Perhaps, in like manner, our faults and vices are
+virtues in some remote planet. I cannot see, however, that this thought
+is of the slightest value to us here, any more than weeds are.
+
+There is another subject which is forced upon my notice. I like
+neighbors, and I like chickens; but I do not think they ought to be
+united near a garden. Neighbors' hens in your garden are an annoyance.
+Even if they did not scratch up the corn, and peck the strawberries,
+and eat the tomatoes, it is not pleasant to see them straddling about
+in their jerky, high-stepping, speculative manner, picking inquisitively
+here and there. It is of no use to tell the neighbor that his hens eat
+your tomatoes: it makes no impression on him, for the tomatoes are not
+his. The best way is to casually remark to him that he has a fine lot of
+chickens, pretty well grown, and that you like spring chickens broiled.
+He will take them away at once.
+
+The neighbors' small children are also out of place in your garden, in
+strawberry and currant time. I hope I appreciate the value of children.
+We should soon come to nothing without them, though the Shakers have
+the best gardens in the world. Without them the common school would
+languish. But the problem is, what to do with them in a garden. For they
+are not good to eat, and there is a law against making away with them.
+The law is not very well enforced, it is true; for people do thin them
+out with constant dosing, paregoric, and soothing-syrups, and scanty
+clothing. But I, for one, feel that it would not be right, aside from
+the law, to take the life, even of the smallest child, for the sake of a
+little fruit, more or less, in the garden. I may be wrong; but these
+are my sentiments, and I am not ashamed of them. When we come, as Bryant
+says in his “Iliad,” to leave the circus of this life, and join that
+innumerable caravan which moves, it will be some satisfaction to us,
+that we have never, in the way of gardening, disposed of even the
+humblest child unnecessarily. My plan would be to put them into
+Sunday-schools more thoroughly, and to give the Sunday-schools an
+agricultural turn; teaching the children the sacredness of neighbors'
+vegetables. I think that our Sunday-schools do not sufficiently impress
+upon children the danger, from snakes and otherwise, of going into the
+neighbors' gardens.
+
+
+
+
+SIXTH WEEK
+
+Somebody has sent me a new sort of hoe, with the wish that I should
+speak favorably of it, if I can consistently. I willingly do so, but
+with the understanding that I am to be at liberty to speak just as
+courteously of any other hoe which I may receive. If I understand
+religious morals, this is the position of the religious press
+with regard to bitters and wringing-machines. In some cases, the
+responsibility of such a recommendation is shifted upon the wife of
+the editor or clergy-man. Polly says she is entirely willing to make a
+certificate, accompanied with an affidavit, with regard to this hoe; but
+her habit of sitting about the garden walk, on an inverted flower-pot,
+while I hoe, some what destroys the practical value of her testimony.
+
+As to this hoe, I do not mind saying that it has changed my view of
+the desirableness and value of human life. It has, in fact, made life
+a holiday to me. It is made on the principle that man is an upright,
+sensible, reasonable being, and not a groveling wretch. It does away
+with the necessity of the hinge in the back. The handle is seven and a
+half feet long. There are two narrow blades, sharp on both edges, which
+come together at an obtuse angle in front; and as you walk along with
+this hoe before you, pushing and pulling with a gentle motion, the weeds
+fall at every thrust and withdrawal, and the slaughter is immediate and
+widespread. When I got this hoe I was troubled with sleepless mornings,
+pains in the back, kleptomania with regard to new weeders; when I went
+into my garden I was always sure to see something. In this disordered
+state of mind and body I got this hoe. The morning after a day of using
+it I slept perfectly and late. I regained my respect for the eighth
+commandment. After two doses of the hoe in the garden, the weeds
+entirely disappeared. Trying it a third morning, I was obliged to throw
+it over the fence in order to save from destruction the green things
+that ought to grow in the garden. Of course, this is figurative
+language. What I mean is, that the fascination of using this hoe is such
+that you are sorely tempted to employ it upon your vegetables, after the
+weeds are laid low, and must hastily withdraw it, to avoid unpleasant
+results. I make this explanation, because I intend to put nothing into
+these agricultural papers that will not bear the strictest scientific
+investigation; nothing that the youngest child cannot understand and cry
+for; nothing that the oldest and wisest men will not need to study with
+care.
+
+I need not add that the care of a garden with this hoe becomes the
+merest pastime. I would not be without one for a single night. The only
+danger is, that you may rather make an idol of the hoe, and somewhat
+neglect your garden in explaining it, and fooling about with it.
+I almost think that, with one of these in the hands of an ordinary
+day-laborer, you might see at night where he had been working.
+
+Let us have peas. I have been a zealous advocate of the birds. I have
+rejoiced in their multiplication. I have endured their concerts at four
+o'clock in the morning without a murmur. Let them come, I said, and eat
+the worms, in order that we, later, may enjoy the foliage and the fruits
+of the earth. We have a cat, a magnificent animal, of the sex which
+votes (but not a pole-cat),--so large and powerful that, if he were in
+the army, he would be called Long Tom. He is a cat of fine disposition,
+the most irreproachable morals I ever saw thrown away in a cat, and a
+splendid hunter. He spends his nights, not in social dissipation, but in
+gathering in rats, mice, flying-squirrels, and also birds. When he first
+brought me a bird, I told him that it was wrong, and tried to convince
+him, while he was eating it, that he was doing wrong; for he is a
+reasonable cat, and understands pretty much everything except the
+binomial theorem and the time down the cycloidal arc. But with no
+effect. The killing of birds went on, to my great regret and shame.
+
+The other day I went to my garden to get a mess of peas. I had seen,
+the day before, that they were just ready to pick. How I had lined the
+ground, planted, hoed, bushed them! The bushes were very fine,--seven
+feet high, and of good wood. How I had delighted in the growing, the
+blowing, the podding! What a touching thought it was that they had all
+podded for me! When I went to pick them, I found the pods all split
+open, and the peas gone. The dear little birds, who are so fond of the
+strawberries, had eaten them all. Perhaps there were left as many as I
+planted: I did not count them. I made a rapid estimate of the cost of
+the seed, the interest of the ground, the price of labor, the value of
+the bushes, the anxiety of weeks of watchfulness. I looked about me
+on the face of Nature. The wind blew from the south so soft and
+treacherous! A thrush sang in the woods so deceitfully! All Nature
+seemed fair. But who was to give me back my peas? The fowls of the air
+have peas; but what has man?
+
+I went into the house. I called Calvin. (That is the name of our cat,
+given him on account of his gravity, morality, and uprightness. We
+never familiarly call him John). I petted Calvin. I lavished upon him
+an enthusiastic fondness. I told him that he had no fault; that the one
+action that I had called a vice was an heroic exhibition of regard for
+my interests. I bade him go and do likewise continually. I now saw how
+much better instinct is than mere unguided reason. Calvin knew. If he
+had put his opinion into English (instead of his native catalogue), it
+would have been: “You need not teach your grandmother to suck eggs.” It
+was only the round of Nature. The worms eat a noxious something in the
+ground. The birds eat the worms. Calvin eats the birds. We eat--no, we
+do not eat Calvin. There the chain stops. When you ascend the scale of
+being, and come to an animal that is, like ourselves, inedible, you
+have arrived at a result where you can rest. Let us respect the cat. He
+completes an edible chain.
+
+I have little heart to discuss methods of raising peas. It occurs to
+me that I can have an iron peabush, a sort of trellis, through which
+I could discharge electricity at frequent intervals, and electrify the
+birds to death when they alight: for they stand upon my beautiful
+brush in order to pick out the peas. An apparatus of this kind, with
+an operator, would cost, however, about as much as the peas. A neighbor
+suggests that I might put up a scarecrow near the vines, which would
+keep the birds away. I am doubtful about it: the birds are too much
+accustomed to seeing a person in poor clothes in the garden to care much
+for that. Another neighbor suggests that the birds do not open the pods;
+that a sort of blast, apt to come after rain, splits the pods, and the
+birds then eat the peas. It may be so. There seems to be complete unity
+of action between the blast and the birds. But, good neighbors, kind
+friends, I desire that you will not increase, by talk, a disappointment
+which you cannot assuage.
+
+
+
+
+SEVENTH WEEK
+
+A garden is an awful responsibility. You never know what you may be
+aiding to grow in it. I heard a sermon, not long ago, in which the
+preacher said that the Christian, at the moment of his becoming one,
+was as perfect a Christian as he would be if he grew to be an archangel;
+that is, that he would not change thereafter at all, but only develop.
+I do not know whether this is good theology, or not; and I hesitate to
+support it by an illustration from my garden, especially as I do not
+want to run the risk of propagating error, and I do not care to give
+away these theological comparisons to clergymen who make me so little
+return in the way of labor. But I find, in dissecting a pea-blossom,
+that hidden in the center of it is a perfect miniature pea-pod, with the
+peas all in it,--as perfect a pea-pod as it will ever be, only it is as
+tiny as a chatelaine ornament. Maize and some other things show the same
+precocity. This confirmation of the theologic theory is startling, and
+sets me meditating upon the moral possibilities of my garden. I may find
+in it yet the cosmic egg.
+
+And, speaking of moral things, I am half determined to petition the
+Ecumenical Council to issue a bull of excommunication against “pusley.”
+ Of all the forms which “error” has taken in this world, I think that is
+about the worst. In the Middle Ages the monks in St. Bernard's ascetic
+community at Clairvaux excommunicated a vineyard which a less rigid
+monk had planted near, so that it bore nothing. In 1120 a bishop of Laon
+excommunicated the caterpillars in his diocese; and, the following year,
+St. Bernard excommunicated the flies in the Monastery of Foigny; and in
+1510 the ecclesiastical court pronounced the dread sentence against
+the rats of Autun, Macon, and Lyons. These examples are sufficient
+precedents. It will be well for the council, however, not to publish the
+bull either just before or just after a rain; for nothing can kill this
+pestilent heresy when the ground is wet.
+
+It is the time of festivals. Polly says we ought to have one,--a
+strawberry-festival. She says they are perfectly delightful: it is so
+nice to get people together!--this hot weather. They create such a good
+feeling! I myself am very fond of festivals. I always go,--when I can
+consistently. Besides the strawberries, there are ice creams and cake
+and lemonade, and that sort of thing: and one always feels so well the
+next day after such a diet! But as social reunions, if there are good
+things to eat, nothing can be pleasanter; and they are very profitable,
+if you have a good object. I agreed that we ought to have a festival;
+but I did not know what object to devote it to. We are not in need of
+an organ, nor of any pulpit-cushions. I do not know that they use
+pulpit-cushions now as much as they used to, when preachers had to have
+something soft to pound, so that they would not hurt their fists. I
+suggested pocket handkerchiefs, and flannels for next winter. But
+Polly says that will not do at all. You must have some charitable
+object,--something that appeals to a vast sense of something; something
+that it will be right to get up lotteries and that sort of thing for.
+I suggest a festival for the benefit of my garden; and this seems
+feasible. In order to make everything pass off pleasantly, invited
+guests will bring or send their own strawberries and cream, which I
+shall be happy to sell to them at a slight advance. There are a great
+many improvements which the garden needs; among them a sounding-board,
+so that the neighbors' children can hear when I tell them to get
+a little farther off from the currant-bushes. I should also like
+a selection from the ten commandments, in big letters, posted up
+conspicuously, and a few traps, that will detain, but not maim, for the
+benefit of those who cannot read. But what is most important is,
+that the ladies should crochet nets to cover over the strawberries. A
+good-sized, well-managed festival ought to produce nets enough to cover
+my entire beds; and I can think of no other method of preserving the
+berries from the birds next year. I wonder how many strawberries it
+would need for a festival and whether they would cost more than the
+nets.
+
+I am more and more impressed, as the summer goes on, with the inequality
+of man's fight with Nature; especially in a civilized state. In
+savagery, it does not much matter; for one does not take a square
+hold, and put out his strength, but rather accommodates himself to
+the situation, and takes what he can get, without raising any dust, or
+putting himself into everlasting opposition. But the minute he begins to
+clear a spot larger than he needs to sleep in for a night, and to try to
+have his own way in the least, Nature is at once up, and vigilant, and
+contests him at every step with all her ingenuity and unwearied vigor.
+This talk of subduing Nature is pretty much nonsense. I do not intend
+to surrender in the midst of the summer campaign, yet I cannot but think
+how much more peaceful my relations would now be with the primal forces,
+if I had, let Nature make the garden according to her own notion.
+(This is written with the thermometer at ninety degrees, and the weeds
+starting up with a freshness and vigor, as if they had just thought of
+it for the first time, and had not been cut down and dragged out every
+other day since the snow went off.)
+
+We have got down the forests, and exterminated savage beasts; but Nature
+is no more subdued than before: she only changes her tactics,--uses
+smaller guns, so to speak. She reenforces herself with a variety of
+bugs, worms, and vermin, and weeds, unknown to the savage state, in
+order to make war upon the things of our planting; and calls in the
+fowls of the air, just as we think the battle is won, to snatch away the
+booty. When one gets almost weary of the struggle, she is as fresh as at
+the beginning,--just, in fact, ready for the fray. I, for my part, begin
+to appreciate the value of frost and snow; for they give the husbandman
+a little peace, and enable him, for a season, to contemplate his
+incessant foe subdued. I do not wonder that the tropical people, where
+Nature never goes to sleep, give it up, and sit in lazy acquiescence.
+
+Here I have been working all the season to make a piece of lawn. It had
+to be graded and sowed and rolled; and I have been shaving it like
+a barber. When it was soft, everything had a tendency to go on to
+it,--cows, and especially wandering hackmen. Hackmen (who are a product
+of civilization) know a lawn when they see it. They rather have a fancy
+for it, and always try to drive so as to cut the sharp borders of it,
+and leave the marks of their wheels in deep ruts of cut-up, ruined turf.
+The other morning, I had just been running the mower over the lawn, and
+stood regarding its smoothness, when I noticed one, two, three puffs
+of fresh earth in it; and, hastening thither, I found that the mole
+had arrived to complete the work of the hackmen. In a half-hour he had
+rooted up the ground like a pig. I found his run-ways. I waited for him
+with a spade. He did not appear; but, the next time I passed by, he had
+ridged the ground in all directions,--a smooth, beautiful animal, with
+fur like silk, if you could only catch him. He appears to enjoy the lawn
+as much as the hackmen did. He does not care how smooth it is. He is
+constantly mining, and ridging it up. I am not sure but he could be
+countermined. I have half a mind to put powder in here and there, and
+blow the whole thing into the air. Some folks set traps for the mole;
+but my moles never seem to go twice in the same place. I am not sure but
+it would bother them to sow the lawn with interlacing snake-grass (the
+botanical name of which, somebody writes me, is devil-grass: the first
+time I have heard that the Devil has a botanical name), which would
+worry them, if it is as difficult for them to get through it as it is
+for me.
+
+I do not speak of this mole in any tone of complaint. He is only a
+part of the untiring resources which Nature brings against the humble
+gardener. I desire to write nothing against him which I should wish to
+recall at the last,--nothing foreign to the spirit of that beautiful
+saying of the dying boy, “He had no copy-book, which, dying, he was
+sorry he had blotted.”
+
+
+
+
+
+EIGHTH WEEK
+
+My garden has been visited by a High Official Person. President Gr-nt
+was here just before the Fourth, getting his mind quiet for that event
+by a few days of retirement, staying with a friend at the head of our
+street; and I asked him if he wouldn't like to come down our way Sunday
+afternoon and take a plain, simple look at my garden, eat a little lemon
+ice-cream and jelly-cake, and drink a glass of native lager-beer. I
+thought of putting up over my gate, “Welcome to the Nation's Gardener;”
+ but I hate nonsense, and did n't do it. I, however, hoed diligently on
+Saturday: what weeds I could n't remove I buried, so that everything
+would look all right. The borders of my drive were trimmed with
+scissors; and everything that could offend the Eye of the Great was
+hustled out of the way.
+
+In relating this interview, it must be distinctly understood that I am
+not responsible for anything that the President said; nor is he, either.
+He is not a great speaker; but whatever he says has an esoteric and an
+exoteric meaning; and some of his remarks about my vegetables went very
+deep. I said nothing to him whatever about politics, at which he seemed
+a good deal surprised: he said it was the first garden he had ever been
+in, with a man, when the talk was not of appointments. I told him that
+this was purely vegetable; after which he seemed more at his ease, and,
+in fact, delighted with everything he saw. He was much interested in my
+strawberry-beds, asked what varieties I had, and requested me to send
+him some seed. He said the patent-office seed was as difficult to raise
+as an appropriation for the St. Domingo business. The playful bean
+seemed also to please him; and he said he had never seen such impressive
+corn and potatoes at this time of year; that it was to him an unexpected
+pleasure, and one of the choicest memories that he should take away with
+him of his visit to New England.
+
+N. B.--That corn and those potatoes which General Gr-nt looked at I
+will sell for seed, at five dollars an ear, and one dollar a potato.
+Office-seekers need not apply.
+
+Knowing the President's great desire for peas, I kept him from that part
+of the garden where the vines grow. But they could not be concealed.
+Those who say that the President is not a man easily moved are knaves
+or fools. When he saw my pea-pods, ravaged by the birds, he burst into
+tears. A man of war, he knows the value of peas. I told him they were an
+excellent sort, “The Champion of England.” As quick as a flash he said,
+“Why don't you call them 'The Reverdy Johnson'?”
+
+It was a very clever bon-mot; but I changed the subject.
+
+The sight of my squashes, with stalks as big as speaking-trumpets,
+restored the President to his usual spirits. He said the summer squash
+was the most ludicrous vegetable he knew. It was nearly all leaf and
+blow, with only a sickly, crook-necked fruit after a mighty fuss. It
+reminded him of the member of Congress from...; but I hastened to change
+the subject.
+
+As we walked along, the keen eye of the President rested upon some
+handsome sprays of “pusley,” which must have grown up since Saturday
+night. It was most fortunate; for it led his Excellency to speak of the
+Chinese problem. He said he had been struck with one, coupling of the
+Chinese and the “pusley” in one of my agricultural papers; and it had a
+significance more far-reaching than I had probably supposed. He had made
+the Chinese problem a special study. He said that I was right in saying
+that “pusley” was the natural food of the Chinaman, and that where
+the “pusley” was, there would the Chinaman be also. For his part, he
+welcomed the Chinese emigration: we needed the Chinaman in our gardens
+to eat the “pusley;” and he thought the whole problem solved by this
+simple consideration. To get rid of rats and “pusley,” he said, was
+a necessity of our civilization. He did not care so much about the
+shoe-business; he did not think that the little Chinese shoes that he
+had seen would be of service in the army: but the garden-interest was
+quite another affair. We want to make a garden of our whole country:
+the hoe, in the hands of a man truly great, he was pleased to say, was
+mightier than the pen. He presumed that General B-tl-r had never taken
+into consideration the garden-question, or he would not assume the
+position he does with regard to the Chinese emigration. He would let
+the Chinese come, even if B-tl-r had to leave, I thought he was going to
+say, but I changed the subject.
+
+During our entire garden interview (operatically speaking, the
+garden-scene), the President was not smoking. I do not know how the
+impression arose that he “uses tobacco in any form;” for I have seen
+him several times, and he was not smoking. Indeed, I offered him a
+Connecticut six; but he wittily said that he did not like a weed in a
+garden,--a remark which I took to have a personal political bearing, and
+changed the subject.
+
+The President was a good deal surprised at the method and fine
+appearance of my garden, and to learn that I had the sole care of it. He
+asked me if I pursued an original course, or whether I got my ideas
+from writers on the subject. I told him that I had had no time to read
+anything on the subject since I began to hoe, except “Lothair,” from
+which I got my ideas of landscape gardening; and that I had worked the
+garden entirely according to my own notions, except that I had borne in
+mind his injunction, “to fight it out on this line if”--The President
+stopped me abruptly, and said it was unnecessary to repeat that remark:
+he thought he had heard it before. Indeed, he deeply regretted that he
+had ever made it. Sometimes, he said, after hearing it in speeches,
+and coming across it in resolutions, and reading it in newspapers, and
+having it dropped jocularly by facetious politicians, who were boring
+him for an office, about twenty-five times a day, say for a month, it
+would get to running through his head, like the “shoo-fly” song
+which B-tl-r sings in the House, until it did seem as if he should go
+distracted. He said, no man could stand that kind of sentence hammering
+on his brain for years.
+
+The President was so much pleased with my management of the garden,
+that he offered me (at least, I so understood him) the position of head
+gardener at the White House, to have care of the exotics. I told him
+that I thanked him, but that I did not desire any foreign appointment.
+I had resolved, when the administration came in, not to take an
+appointment; and I had kept my resolution. As to any home office, I was
+poor, but honest; and, of course, it would be useless for me to take
+one. The President mused a moment, and then smiled, and said he would
+see what could be done for me. I did not change the subject; but nothing
+further was said by General Gr-nt.
+
+The President is a great talker (contrary to the general impression);
+but I think he appreciated his quiet hour in my garden. He said it
+carried him back to his youth farther than anything he had seen lately.
+He looked forward with delight to the time when he could again have his
+private garden, grow his own lettuce and tomatoes, and not have to get
+so much “sarce” from Congress.
+
+The chair in which the President sat, while declining to take a glass of
+lager I have had destroyed, in order that no one may sit in it. It
+was the only way to save it, if I may so speak. It would have been
+impossible to keep it from use by any precautions. There are people who
+would have sat in it, if the seat had been set with iron spikes. Such is
+the adoration of Station.
+
+
+
+
+NINTH WEEK
+
+I am more and more impressed with the moral qualities of vegetables, and
+contemplate forming a science which shall rank with comparative anatomy
+and comparative philology,--the science of comparative vegetable
+morality. We live in an age of protoplasm. And, if life-matter is
+essentially the same in all forms of life, I purpose to begin early, and
+ascertain the nature of the plants for which I am responsible. I will
+not associate with any vegetable which is disreputable, or has not some
+quality that can contribute to my moral growth. I do not care to be seen
+much with the squashes or the dead-beets. Fortunately I can cut down any
+sorts I do not like with the hoe, and, probably, commit no more sin in
+so doing than the Christians did in hewing down the Jews in the Middle
+Ages.
+
+This matter of vegetable rank has not been at all studied as it should
+be. Why do we respect some vegetables and despise others, when all of
+them come to an equal honor or ignominy on the table? The bean is a
+graceful, confiding, engaging vine; but you never can put beans into
+poetry, nor into the highest sort of prose. There is no dignity in the
+bean. Corn, which, in my garden, grows alongside the bean, and, so far
+as I can see, with no affectation of superiority, is, however, the child
+of song. It waves in all literature. But mix it with beans, and its high
+tone is gone. Succotash is vulgar. It is the bean in it. The bean is a
+vulgar vegetable, without culture, or any flavor of high society among
+vegetables. Then there is the cool cucumber, like so many people, good
+for nothing when it is ripe and the wildness has gone out of it. How
+inferior in quality it is to the melon, which grows upon a similar
+vine, is of a like watery consistency, but is not half so valuable! The
+cucumber is a sort of low comedian in a company where the melon is a
+minor gentleman. I might also contrast the celery with the potato. The
+associations are as opposite as the dining-room of the duchess and the
+cabin of the peasant. I admire the potato, both in vine and blossom; but
+it is not aristocratic. I began digging my potatoes, by the way, about
+the 4th of July; and I fancy I have discovered the right way to do it. I
+treat the potato just as I would a cow. I do not pull them up, and shake
+them out, and destroy them; but I dig carefully at the side of the hill,
+remove the fruit which is grown, leaving the vine undisturbed: and my
+theory is, that it will go on bearing, and submitting to my exactions,
+until the frost cuts it down. It is a game that one would not undertake
+with a vegetable of tone.
+
+The lettuce is to me a most interesting study. Lettuce is like
+conversation: it must be fresh and crisp, so sparkling that you scarcely
+notice the bitter in it. Lettuce, like most talkers, is, however, apt to
+run rapidly to seed. Blessed is that sort which comes to a head, and so
+remains, like a few people I know; growing more solid and satisfactory
+and tender at the same time, and whiter at the center, and crisp in
+their maturity. Lettuce, like conversation, requires a good deal of oil
+to avoid friction, and keep the company smooth; a pinch of attic salt; a
+dash of pepper; a quantity of mustard and vinegar, by all means, but so
+mixed that you will notice no sharp contrasts; and a trifle of sugar.
+You can put anything, and the more things the better, into salad, as
+into a conversation; but everything depends upon the skill of mixing. I
+feel that I am in the best society when I am with lettuce. It is in the
+select circle of vegetables. The tomato appears well on the table; but
+you do not want to ask its origin. It is a most agreeable parvenu. Of
+course, I have said nothing about the berries. They live in another and
+more ideal region; except, perhaps, the currant. Here we see, that,
+even among berries, there are degrees of breeding. The currant is well
+enough, clear as truth, and exquisite in color; but I ask you to notice
+how far it is from the exclusive hauteur of the aristocratic strawberry,
+and the native refinement of the quietly elegant raspberry.
+
+I do not know that chemistry, searching for protoplasm, is able to
+discover the tendency of vegetables. It can only be found out by outward
+observation. I confess that I am suspicious of the bean, for instance.
+There are signs in it of an unregulated life. I put up the most
+attractive sort of poles for my Limas. They stand high and straight,
+like church-spires, in my theological garden,--lifted up; and some of
+them have even budded, like Aaron's rod. No church-steeple in a
+New England village was ever better fitted to draw to it the rising
+generation on Sunday, than those poles to lift up my beans towards
+heaven. Some of them did run up the sticks seven feet, and then
+straggled off into the air in a wanton manner; but more than half of
+them went gallivanting off to the neighboring grape-trellis, and wound
+their tendrils with the tendrils of the grape, with a disregard of the
+proprieties of life which is a satire upon human nature. And the grape
+is morally no better. I think the ancients, who were not troubled with
+the recondite mystery of protoplasm, were right in the mythic union of
+Bacchus and Venus.
+
+Talk about the Darwinian theory of development, and the principle
+of natural selection! I should like to see a garden let to run in
+accordance with it. If I had left my vegetables and weeds to a free
+fight, in which the strongest specimens only should come to maturity,
+and the weaker go to the wall, I can clearly see that I should have had
+a pretty mess of it. It would have been a scene of passion and license
+and brutality. The “pusley” would have strangled the strawberry; the
+upright corn, which has now ears to hear the guilty beating of the
+hearts of the children who steal the raspberries, would have been
+dragged to the earth by the wandering bean; the snake-grass would have
+left no place for the potatoes under ground; and the tomatoes would have
+been swamped by the lusty weeds. With a firm hand, I have had to make my
+own “natural selection.” Nothing will so well bear watching as a garden,
+except a family of children next door. Their power of selection beats
+mine. If they could read half as well as they can steal awhile away, I
+should put up a notice, “Children, beware! There is Protoplasm here.”
+ But I suppose it would have no effect. I believe they would eat
+protoplasm as quick as anything else, ripe or green. I wonder if this is
+going to be a cholera-year. Considerable cholera is the only thing that
+would let my apples and pears ripen. Of course I do not care for the
+fruit; but I do not want to take the responsibility of letting so much
+“life-matter,” full of crude and even wicked vegetable-human tendencies,
+pass into the composition of the neighbors' children, some of whom may
+be as immortal as snake-grass. There ought to be a public meeting about
+this, and resolutions, and perhaps a clambake. At least, it ought to be
+put into the catechism, and put in strong.
+
+
+
+
+TENTH WEEK
+
+I think I have discovered the way to keep peas from the birds. I tried
+the scarecrow plan, in a way which I thought would outwit the shrewdest
+bird. The brain of the bird is not large; but it is all concentrated
+on one object, and that is the attempt to elude the devices of modern
+civilization which injure his chances of food. I knew that, if I put up
+a complete stuffed man, the bird would detect the imitation at once:
+the perfection of the thing would show him that it was a trick. People
+always overdo the matter when they attempt deception. I therefore hung
+some loose garments, of a bright color, upon a rake-head, and set them
+up among the vines. The supposition was, that the bird would think there
+was an effort to trap him, that there was a man behind, holding up these
+garments, and would sing, as he kept at a distance, “You can't catch
+me with any such double device.” The bird would know, or think he knew,
+that I would not hang up such a scare, in the expectation that it would
+pass for a man, and deceive a bird; and he would therefore look for
+a deeper plot. I expected to outwit the bird by a duplicity that was
+simplicity itself I may have over-calculated the sagacity and reasoning
+power of the bird. At any rate, I did over-calculate the amount of peas
+I should gather.
+
+But my game was only half played. In another part of the garden were
+other peas, growing and blowing. To-these I took good care not to
+attract the attention of the bird by any scarecrow whatever! I left the
+old scarecrow conspicuously flaunting above the old vines; and by this
+means I hope to keep the attention of the birds confined to that side of
+the garden. I am convinced that this is the true use of a scarecrow:
+it is a lure, and not a warning. If you wish to save men from any
+particular vice, set up a tremendous cry of warning about some other;
+and they will all give their special efforts to the one to which
+attention is called. This profound truth is about the only thing I have
+yet realized out of my pea-vines.
+
+However, the garden does begin to yield. I know of nothing that
+makes one feel more complacent, in these July days, than to have his
+vegetables from his own garden. What an effect it has on the market-man
+and the butcher! It is a kind of declaration of independence. The
+market-man shows me his peas and beets and tomatoes, and supposes
+he shall send me out some with the meat. “No, I thank you,” I say
+carelessly; “I am raising my own this year.” Whereas I have been wont to
+remark, “Your vegetables look a little wilted this weather,” I now say,
+“What a fine lot of vegetables you've got!” When a man is not going to
+buy, he can afford to be generous. To raise his own vegetables makes a
+person feel, somehow, more liberal. I think the butcher is touched by
+the influence, and cuts off a better roast for me, The butcher is my
+friend when he sees that I am not wholly dependent on him.
+
+It is at home, however, that the effect is most marked, though sometimes
+in a way that I had not expected. I have never read of any Roman
+supper that seemed to me equal to a dinner of my own vegetables; when
+everything on the table is the product of my own labor, except the
+clams, which I have not been able to raise yet, and the chickens, which
+have withdrawn from the garden just when they were most attractive. It
+is strange what a taste you suddenly have for things you never liked
+before. The squash has always been to me a dish of contempt; but I eat
+it now as if it were my best friend. I never cared for the beet or
+the bean; but I fancy now that I could eat them all, tops and all, so
+completely have they been transformed by the soil in which they grew. I
+think the squash is less squashy, and the beet has a deeper hue of rose,
+for my care of them.
+
+I had begun to nurse a good deal of pride in presiding over a table
+whereon was the fruit of my honest industry. But woman!--John Stuart
+Mill is right when he says that we do not know anything about women. Six
+thousand years is as one day with them. I thought I had something to do
+with those vegetables. But when I saw Polly seated at her side of the
+table, presiding over the new and susceptible vegetables, flanked by
+the squash and the beans, and smiling upon the green corn and the new
+potatoes, as cool as the cucumbers which lay sliced in ice before her,
+and when she began to dispense the fresh dishes, I saw at once that the
+day of my destiny was over. You would have thought that she owned all
+the vegetables, and had raised them all from their earliest years. Such
+quiet, vegetable airs! Such gracious appropriation! At length I said,--
+“Polly, do you know who planted that squash, or those squashes?”
+
+“James, I suppose.”
+
+“Well, yes, perhaps James did plant them, to a certain extent. But who
+hoed them?”
+
+“We did.”
+
+“We did!” I said, in the most sarcastic manner.
+
+And I suppose we put on the sackcloth and ashes, when the striped bug
+came at four o'clock A.M., and we watched the tender leaves, and watered
+night and morning the feeble plants. “I tell you, Polly,” said I,
+uncorking the Bordeaux raspberry vinegar, “there is not a pea here that
+does not represent a drop of moisture wrung from my brow, not a beet
+that does not stand for a back-ache, not a squash that has not caused me
+untold anxiety; and I did hope--but I will say no more.”
+
+Observation.--In this sort of family discussion, “I will say no more” is
+the most effective thing you can close up with.
+
+I am not an alarmist. I hope I am as cool as anybody this hot summer.
+But I am quite ready to say to Polly, or any other woman, “You can have
+the ballot; only leave me the vegetables, or, what is more important,
+the consciousness of power in vegetables.” I see how it is. Woman is now
+supreme in the house. She already stretches out her hand to grasp the
+garden. She will gradually control everything. Woman is one of the
+ablest and most cunning creatures who have ever mingled in human
+affairs. I understand those women who say they don't want the ballot.
+They purpose to hold the real power while we go through the mockery of
+making laws. They want the power without the responsibility. (Suppose my
+squash had not come up, or my beans--as they threatened at one time--had
+gone the wrong way: where would I have been?) We are to be held to
+all the responsibilities. Woman takes the lead in all the departments,
+leaving us politics only. And what is politics? Let me raise the
+vegetables of a nation, says Polly, and I care not who makes its
+politics. Here I sat at the table, armed with the ballot, but really
+powerless among my own vegetables. While we are being amused by the
+ballot, woman is quietly taking things into her own hands.
+
+
+
+
+ELEVENTH WEEK
+
+Perhaps, after all, it is not what you get out of a garden, but what you
+put into it, that is the most remunerative. What is a man? A question
+frequently asked, and never, so far as I know, satisfactorily answered.
+He commonly spends his seventy years, if so many are given him, in
+getting ready to enjoy himself. How many hours, how many minutes, does
+one get of that pure content which is happiness? I do not mean laziness,
+which is always discontent; but that serene enjoyment, in which all the
+natural senses have easy play, and the unnatural ones have a holiday.
+There is probably nothing that has such a tranquilizing effect, and
+leads into such content as gardening. By gardening, I do not mean that
+insane desire to raise vegetables which some have; but the philosophical
+occupation of contact with the earth, and companionship with gently
+growing things and patient processes; that exercise which soothes the
+spirit, and develops the deltoid muscles.
+
+In half an hour I can hoe myself right away from this world, as we
+commonly see it, into a large place, where there are no obstacles. What
+an occupation it is for thought! The mind broods like a hen on eggs.
+The trouble is, that you are not thinking about anything, but are really
+vegetating like the plants around you. I begin to know what the joy of
+the grape-vine is in running up the trellis, which is similar to that of
+the squirrel in running up a tree. We all have something in our nature
+that requires contact with the earth. In the solitude of garden-labor,
+one gets into a sort of communion with the vegetable life, which makes
+the old mythology possible. For instance, I can believe that the dryads
+are plenty this summer: my garden is like an ash-heap. Almost all the
+moisture it has had in weeks has been the sweat of honest industry.
+
+The pleasure of gardening in these days, when the thermometer is at
+ninety, is one that I fear I shall not be able to make intelligible to
+my readers, many of whom do not appreciate the delight of soaking in
+the sunshine. I suppose that the sun, going through a man, as it will
+on such a day, takes out of him rheumatism, consumption, and every other
+disease, except sudden death--from sun-stroke. But, aside from this,
+there is an odor from the evergreens, the hedges, the various plants
+and vines, that is only expressed and set afloat at a high temperature,
+which is delicious; and, hot as it may be, a little breeze will come
+at intervals, which can be heard in the treetops, and which is an
+unobtrusive benediction. I hear a quail or two whistling in the ravine;
+and there is a good deal of fragmentary conversation going on among
+the birds, even on the warmest days. The companionship of Calvin, also,
+counts for a good deal. He usually attends me, unless I work too long
+in one place; sitting down on the turf, displaying the ermine of his
+breast, and watching my movements with great intelligence. He has a
+feline and genuine love for the beauties of Nature, and will establish
+himself where there is a good view, and look on it for hours. He always
+accompanies us when we go to gather the vegetables, seeming to be
+desirous to know what we are to have for dinner. He is a connoisseur
+in the garden; being fond of almost all the vegetables, except the
+cucumber,--a dietetic hint to man. I believe it is also said that the
+pig will not eat tobacco. These are important facts. It is singular,
+however, that those who hold up the pigs as models to us never hold us
+up as models to the pigs.
+
+I wish I knew as much about natural history and the habits of animals
+as Calvin does. He is the closest observer I ever saw; and there are
+few species of animals on the place that he has not analyzed. I think he
+has, to use a euphemism very applicable to him, got outside of every one
+of them, except the toad. To the toad he is entirely indifferent; but I
+presume he knows that the toad is the most useful animal in the garden.
+I think the Agricultural Society ought to offer a prize for the finest
+toad. When Polly comes to sit in the shade near my strawberry-beds, to
+shell peas, Calvin is always lying near in apparent obliviousness; but
+not the slightest unusual sound can be made in the bushes, that he is
+not alert, and prepared to investigate the cause of it. It is this habit
+of observation, so cultivated, which has given him such a trained mind,
+and made him so philosophical. It is within the capacity of even the
+humblest of us to attain this.
+
+And, speaking of the philosophical temper, there is no class of men
+whose society is more to be desired for this quality than that of
+plumbers. They are the most agreeable men I know; and the boys in the
+business begin to be agreeable very early. I suspect the secret of it
+is, that they are agreeable by the hour. In the driest days, my fountain
+became disabled: the pipe was stopped up. A couple of plumbers, with the
+implements of their craft, came out to view the situation. There was a
+good deal of difference of opinion about where the stoppage was. I found
+the plumbers perfectly willing to sit down and talk about it,--talk by
+the hour. Some of their guesses and remarks were exceedingly ingenious;
+and their general observations on other subjects were excellent in their
+way, and could hardly have been better if they had been made by the job.
+The work dragged a little, as it is apt to do by the hour. The plumbers
+had occasion to make me several visits. Sometimes they would find, upon
+arrival, that they had forgotten some indispensable tool; and one would
+go back to the shop, a mile and a half, after it; and his comrade would
+await his return with the most exemplary patience, and sit down and
+talk,--always by the hour. I do not know but it is a habit to have
+something wanted at the shop. They seemed to me very good workmen, and
+always willing to stop and talk about the job, or anything else, when I
+went near them. Nor had they any of that impetuous hurry that is said
+to be the bane of our American civilization. To their credit be it said,
+that I never observed anything of it in them. They can afford to wait.
+Two of them will sometimes wait nearly half a day while a comrade goes
+for a tool. They are patient and philosophical. It is a great pleasure
+to meet such men. One only wishes there was some work he could do for
+them by the hour. There ought to be reciprocity. I think they have very
+nearly solved the problem of Life: it is to work for other people, never
+for yourself, and get your pay by the hour. You then have no anxiety,
+and little work. If you do things by the job, you are perpetually
+driven: the hours are scourges. If you work by the hour, you gently sail
+on the stream of Time, which is always bearing you on to the haven of
+Pay, whether you make any effort, or not. Working by the hour tends to
+make one moral. A plumber working by the job, trying to unscrew a rusty,
+refractory nut, in a cramped position, where the tongs continually
+slipped off, would swear; but I never heard one of them swear, or
+exhibit the least impatience at such a vexation, working by the hour.
+Nothing can move a man who is paid by the hour. How sweet the flight of
+time seems to his calm mind!
+
+
+
+
+TWELFTH WEEK
+
+Mr. Horace Greeley, the introduction of whose name confers an honor upon
+this page (although I ought to say that it is used entirely without his
+consent), is my sole authority in agriculture. In politics I do not dare
+to follow him; but in agriculture he is irresistible. When, therefore,
+I find him advising Western farmers not to hill up their corn, I think
+that his advice must be political. You must hill up your corn. People
+always have hilled up their corn. It would take a constitutional
+amendment to change the practice, that has pertained ever since maize
+was raised. “It will stand the drought better,” says Mr. Greeley, “if
+the ground is left level.” I have corn in my garden, ten and twelve feet
+high, strong and lusty, standing the drought like a grenadier; and it
+is hilled. In advising this radical change, Mr. Greeley evidently has
+a political purpose. He might just as well say that you should not hill
+beans, when everybody knows that a “hill of beans” is one of the most
+expressive symbols of disparagement. When I become too lazy to hill my
+corn, I, too, shall go into politics.
+
+I am satisfied that it is useless to try to cultivate “pusley.” I set a
+little of it one side, and gave it some extra care. It did not thrive
+as well as that which I was fighting. The fact is, there is a spirit of
+moral perversity in the plant, which makes it grow the more, the more
+it is interfered with. I am satisfied of that. I doubt if any one has
+raised more “pusley” this year than I have; and my warfare with it has
+been continual. Neither of us has slept much. If you combat it, it will
+grow, to use an expression that will be understood by many, like the
+devil. I have a neighbor, a good Christian man, benevolent, and a person
+of good judgment. He planted next to me an acre of turnips recently.
+A few days after, he went to look at his crop; and he found the entire
+ground covered with a thick and luxurious carpet of “pusley,” with a
+turnip-top worked in here and there as an ornament. I have seldom seen
+so thrifty a field. I advised my neighbor next time to sow “pusley” and
+then he might get a few turnips. I wish there was more demand in our
+city markets for “pusley” as a salad. I can recommend it.
+
+It does not take a great man to soon discover that, in raising anything,
+the greater part of the plants goes into stalk and leaf, and the fruit
+is a most inconsiderable portion. I plant and hoe a hill of corn: it
+grows green and stout, and waves its broad leaves high in the air, and
+is months in perfecting itself, and then yields us not enough for a
+dinner. It grows because it delights to do so,--to take the juices out
+of my ground, to absorb my fertilizers, to wax luxuriant, and disport
+itself in the summer air, and with very little thought of making any
+return to me. I might go all through my garden and fruit trees with a
+similar result. I have heard of places where there was very little
+land to the acre. It is universally true that there is a great deal of
+vegetable show and fuss for the result produced. I do not complain of
+this. One cannot expect vegetables to be better than men: and they make
+a great deal of ostentatious splurge; and many of them come to no result
+at last. Usually, the more show of leaf and wood, the less fruit. This
+melancholy reflection is thrown in here in order to make dog-days seem
+cheerful in comparison.
+
+One of the minor pleasures of life is that of controlling vegetable
+activity and aggressions with the pruning-knife. Vigorous and rapid
+growth is, however, a necessity to the sport. To prune feeble plants and
+shrubs is like acting the part of dry-nurse to a sickly orphan. You must
+feel the blood of Nature bound under your hand, and get the thrill of
+its life in your nerves. To control and culture a strong, thrifty plant
+in this way is like steering a ship under full headway, or driving a
+locomotive with your hand on the lever, or pulling the reins over a fast
+horse when his blood and tail are up. I do not understand, by the
+way, the pleasure of the jockey in setting up the tail of the horse
+artificially. If I had a horse with a tail not able to sit up, I should
+feed the horse, and curry him into good spirits, and let him set up
+his own tail. When I see a poor, spiritless horse going by with an
+artificially set-up tail, it is only a signal of distress. I desire to
+be surrounded only by healthy, vigorous plants and trees, which require
+constant cutting-in and management. Merely to cut away dead branches is
+like perpetual attendance at a funeral, and puts one in low spirits.
+I want to have a garden and orchard rise up and meet me every morning,
+with the request to “lay on, Macduff.” I respect old age; but an old
+currant-bush, hoary with mossy bark, is a melancholy spectacle.
+
+I suppose the time has come when I am expected to say something about
+fertilizers: all agriculturists do. When you plant, you think you cannot
+fertilize too much: when you get the bills for the manure, you think
+you cannot fertilize too little. Of course you do not expect to get the
+value of the manure back in fruits and vegetables; but something is due
+to science,--to chemistry in particular. You must have a knowledge
+of soils, must have your soil analyzed, and then go into a course of
+experiments to find what it needs. It needs analyzing,--that, I am clear
+about: everything needs that. You had better have the soil analyzed
+before you buy: if there is “pusley” in it, let it alone. See if it is a
+soil that requires much hoeing, and how fine it will get if there is no
+rain for two months. But when you come to fertilizing, if I understand
+the agricultural authorities, you open a pit that will ultimately
+swallow you up,--farm and all. It is the great subject of modern times,
+how to fertilize without ruinous expense; how, in short, not to starve
+the earth to death while we get our living out of it. Practically, the
+business is hardly to the taste of a person of a poetic turn of mind.
+The details of fertilizing are not agreeable. Michael Angelo, who tried
+every art, and nearly every trade, never gave his mind to fertilizing.
+It is much pleasanter and easier to fertilize with a pen, as the
+agricultural writers do, than with a fork. And this leads me to say,
+that, in carrying on a garden yourself, you must have a “consulting”
+ gardener; that is, a man to do the heavy and unpleasant work. To such a
+man, I say, in language used by Demosthenes to the Athenians, and which
+is my advice to all gardeners, “Fertilize, fertilize, fertilize!”
+
+
+
+
+THIRTEENTH WEEK
+
+I find that gardening has unsurpassed advantages for the study of
+natural history; and some scientific facts have come under my
+own observation, which cannot fail to interest naturalists and
+un-naturalists in about the same degree. Much, for instance, has been
+written about the toad, an animal without which no garden would be
+complete. But little account has been made of his value: the beauty of
+his eye alone has been dwelt on; and little has been said of his mouth,
+and its important function as a fly and bug trap. His habits, and even
+his origin, have been misunderstood. Why, as an illustration, are toads
+so plenty after a thunder-shower? All my life long, no one has been able
+to answer me that question. Why, after a heavy shower, and in the midst
+of it, do such multitudes of toads, especially little ones, hop about on
+the gravel-walks? For many years, I believed that they rained down; and
+I suppose many people think so still. They are so small, and they
+come in such numbers only in the shower, that the supposition is not
+a violent one. “Thick as toads after a shower,” is one of our
+best proverbs. I asked an explanation 'of this of a thoughtful
+woman,--indeed, a leader in the great movement to have all the toads hop
+in any direction, without any distinction of sex or religion. Her reply
+was, that the toads come out during the shower to get water. This,
+however, is not the fact. I have discovered that they come out not to
+get water. I deluged a dry flower-bed, the other night, with pailful
+after pailful of water. Instantly the toads came out of their holes in
+the dirt, by tens and twenties and fifties, to escape death by drowning.
+The big ones fled away in a ridiculous streak of hopping; and the little
+ones sprang about in the wildest confusion. The toad is just like any
+other land animal: when his house is full of water, he quits it. These
+facts, with the drawings of the water and the toads, are at the service
+of the distinguished scientists of Albany in New York, who were so much
+impressed by the Cardiff Giant.
+
+The domestic cow is another animal whose ways I have a chance to study,
+and also to obliterate in the garden. One of my neighbors has a cow, but
+no land; and he seems desirous to pasture her on the surface of the
+land of other people: a very reasonable desire. The man proposed that he
+should be allowed to cut the grass from my grounds for his cow. I knew
+the cow, having often had her in my garden; knew her gait and the size
+of her feet, which struck me as a little large for the size of the body.
+Having no cow myself, but acquaintance with my neighbor's, I told him
+that I thought it would be fair for him to have the grass. He was,
+therefore, to keep the grass nicely cut, and to keep his cow at home. I
+waited some time after the grass needed cutting; and, as my neighbor
+did not appear, I hired it cut. No sooner was it done than he promptly
+appeared, and raked up most of it, and carried it away. He had evidently
+been waiting that opportunity. When the grass grew again, the neighbor
+did not appear with his scythe; but one morning I found the cow tethered
+on the sward, hitched near the clothes-horse, a short distance from
+the house. This seemed to be the man's idea of the best way to cut the
+grass. I disliked to have the cow there, because I knew her inclination
+to pull up the stake, and transfer her field of mowing to the garden,
+but especially because of her voice. She has the most melancholy “moo” I
+ever heard. It is like the wail of one uninfallible, excommunicated, and
+lost. It is a most distressing perpetual reminder of the brevity of life
+and the shortness of feed. It is unpleasant to the family. We sometimes
+hear it in the middle of the night, breaking the silence like a
+suggestion of coming calamity. It is as bad as the howling of a dog at a
+funeral.
+
+I told the man about it; but he seemed to think that he was not
+responsible for the cow's voice. I then told him to take her away; and
+he did, at intervals, shifting her to different parts of the grounds in
+my absence, so that the desolate voice would startle us from unexpected
+quarters. If I were to unhitch the cow, and turn her loose, I knew where
+she would go. If I were to lead her away, the question was, Where? for
+I did not fancy leading a cow about till I could find somebody who
+was willing to pasture her. To this dilemma had my excellent neighbor
+reduced me. But I found him, one Sunday morning,--a day when it would
+not do to get angry, tying his cow at the foot of the hill; the beast
+all the time going on in that abominable voice. I told the man that I
+could not have the cow in the grounds. He said, “All right, boss;” but
+he did not go away. I asked him to clear out. The man, who is a French
+sympathizer from the Republic of Ireland, kept his temper perfectly. He
+said he wasn't doing anything, just feeding his cow a bit: he wouldn't
+make me the least trouble in the world. I reminded him that he had been
+told again and again not to come here; that he might have all the grass,
+but he should not bring his cow upon the premises. The imperturbable man
+assented to everything that I said, and kept on feeding his cow. Before
+I got him to go to fresh scenes and pastures new, the Sabbath was almost
+broken; but it was saved by one thing: it is difficult to be emphatic
+when no one is emphatic on the other side. The man and his cow have
+taught me a great lesson, which I shall recall when I keep a cow. I can
+recommend this cow, if anybody wants one, as a steady boarder, whose
+keeping will cost the owner little; but, if her milk is at all like her
+voice, those who drink it are on the straight road to lunacy.
+
+I think I have said that we have a game-preserve. We keep quails, or try
+to, in the thickly wooded, bushed, and brushed ravine. This bird is
+a great favorite with us, dead or alive, on account of its tasteful
+plumage, its tender flesh, its domestic virtues, and its pleasant
+piping. Besides, although I appreciate toads and cows, and all that sort
+of thing, I like to have a game-preserve more in the English style.
+And we did. For in July, while the game-law was on, and the
+young quails were coming on, we were awakened one morning by
+firing,--musketry-firing, close at hand. My first thought was, that war
+was declared; but, as I should never pay much attention to war declared
+at that time in the morning, I went to sleep again. But the occurrence
+was repeated,--and not only early in the morning, but at night. There
+was calling of dogs, breaking down of brush, and firing of guns. It is
+hardly pleasant to have guns fired in the direction of the house, at
+your own quails. The hunters could be sometimes seen, but never caught.
+Their best time was about sunrise; but, before one could dress and get
+to the front, they would retire.
+
+One morning, about four o'clock, I heard the battle renewed. I sprang
+up, but not in arms, and went to a window. Polly (like another 'blessed
+damozel') flew to another window,--
+
+   “The blessed damozel leaned out
+    From the gold bar of heaven,”
+
+and reconnoitered from behind the blinds.
+
+   “The wonder was not yet quite gone
+    From that still look of hers,”
+
+when an armed man and a legged dog appeared in the opening. I was
+vigilantly watching him.
+
+ .... “And now
+    She spoke through the still weather.”
+
+“Are you afraid to speak to him?” asked Polly.
+
+Not exactly,
+
+ ....“she spoke as when
+    The stars sang in their spheres.
+
+“Stung by this inquiry, I leaned out of the window till
+
+   “The bar I leaned on (was) warm,”
+
+and cried,-- “Halloo, there! What are you doing?”
+
+“Look out he don't shoot you,” called out Polly from the other window,
+suddenly going on another tack.
+
+I explained that a sportsman would not be likely to shoot a gentleman in
+his own house, with bird-shot, so long as quails were to be had.
+
+“You have no business here: what are you after?” I repeated.
+
+“Looking for a lost hen,” said the man as he strode away.
+
+The reply was so satisfactory and conclusive that I shut the blinds and
+went to bed.
+
+But one evening I overhauled one of the poachers. Hearing his dog in the
+thicket, I rushed through the brush, and came in sight of the hunter
+as he was retreating down the road. He came to a halt; and we had some
+conversation in a high key. Of course I threatened to prosecute him. I
+believe that is the thing to do in such cases; but how I was to do it,
+when I did not know his name or ancestry, and couldn't see his face,
+never occurred to me. (I remember, now, that a farmer once proposed to
+prosecute me when I was fishing in a trout-brook on his farm, and asked
+my name for that purpose.) He said he should smile to see me prosecute
+him.
+
+“You can't do it: there ain't no notice up about trespassing.”
+
+This view of the common law impressed me; and I said,
+
+“But these are private grounds.”
+
+“Private h---!” was all his response.
+
+You can't argue much with a man who has a gun in his hands, when you
+have none. Besides, it might be a needle-gun, for aught I knew. I gave
+it up, and we separated.
+
+There is this disadvantage about having a game preserve attached to your
+garden: it makes life too lively.
+
+
+
+
+FOURTEENTH WEEK
+
+In these golden latter August days, Nature has come to a serene
+equilibrium. Having flowered and fruited, she is enjoying herself. I can
+see how things are going: it is a down-hill business after this; but,
+for the time being, it is like swinging in a hammock,--such a delicious
+air, such a graceful repose! I take off my hat as I stroll into the
+garden and look about; and it does seem as if Nature had sounded a
+truce. I did n't ask for it. I went out with a hoe; but the serene
+sweetness disarms me. Thrice is he armed who has a long-handled hoe,
+with a double blade. Yet to-day I am almost ashamed to appear in such a
+belligerent fashion, with this terrible mitrailleuse of gardening.
+
+The tomatoes are getting tired of ripening, and are beginning to go into
+a worthless condition,--green. The cucumbers cumber the ground,--great
+yellow, over-ripe objects, no more to be compared to the crisp beauty
+of their youth than is the fat swine of the sty to the clean little pig.
+The nutmeg-melons, having covered themselves with delicate lace-work,
+are now ready to leave the vine. I know they are ripe if they come
+easily off the stem.
+
+Moral Observations.--You can tell when people are ripe by their
+willingness to let go. Richness and ripeness are not exactly the same.
+The rich are apt to hang to the stem with tenacity. I have nothing
+against the rich. If I were not virtuous, I should like to be rich.
+But we cannot have everything, as the man said when he was down with
+small-pox and cholera, and the yellow fever came into the neighborhood.
+
+Now, the grapes, soaked in this liquid gold, called air, begin to turn,
+mindful of the injunction, “to turn or burn.” The clusters under the
+leaves are getting quite purple, but look better than they taste. I
+think there is no danger but they will be gathered as soon as they are
+ripe. One of the blessings of having an open garden is, that I do not
+have to watch my fruit: a dozen youngsters do that, and let it waste
+no time after it matures. I wish it were possible to grow a variety of
+grape like the explosive bullets, that should explode in the stomach:
+the vine would make such a nice border for the garden,--a masked battery
+of grape. The pears, too, are getting russet and heavy; and here and
+there amid the shining leaves one gleams as ruddy as the cheek of the
+Nutbrown Maid. The Flemish Beauties come off readily from the stem, if I
+take them in my hand: they say all kinds of beauty come off by handling.
+
+The garden is peace as much as if it were an empire. Even the man's cow
+lies down under the tree where the man has tied her, with such an air of
+contentment, that I have small desire to disturb her. She is chewing my
+cud as if it were hers. Well, eat on and chew on, melancholy brute. I
+have not the heart to tell the man to take you away: and it would do no
+good if I had; he wouldn't do it. The man has not a taking way. Munch
+on, ruminant creature.
+
+The frost will soon come; the grass will be brown. I will be charitable
+while this blessed lull continues: for our benevolences must soon be
+turned to other and more distant objects,--the amelioration of the
+condition of the Jews, the education of theological young men in the
+West, and the like.
+
+I do not know that these appearances are deceitful; but I sufficiently
+know that this is a wicked world, to be glad that I have taken it on
+shares. In fact, I could not pick the pears alone, not to speak of
+eating them. When I climb the trees, and throw down the dusky fruit,
+Polly catches it in her apron; nearly always, however, letting go when
+it drops, the fall is so sudden. The sun gets in her face; and, every
+time a pear comes down it is a surprise, like having a tooth out, she
+says.
+
+“If I could n't hold an apron better than that!”
+
+But the sentence is not finished: it is useless to finish that sort of a
+sentence in this delicious weather. Besides, conversation is dangerous.
+As, for instance, towards evening I am preparing a bed for a sowing of
+turnips,--not that I like turnips in the least; but this is the season
+to sow them. Polly comes out, and extemporizes her usual seat to
+“consult me” about matters while I work. I well know that something is
+coming.
+
+“This is a rotation of crops, is n't it?”
+
+“Yes: I have rotated the gone-to-seed lettuce off, and expect to rotate
+the turnips in; it is a political fashion.”
+
+“Is n't it a shame that the tomatoes are all getting ripe at once? What
+a lot of squashes! I wish we had an oyster-bed. Do you want me to help
+you any more than I am helping?”
+
+“No, I thank you.” (I wonder what all this is about?)
+
+“Don't you think we could sell some strawberries next year?”
+
+“By all means, sell anything. We shall no doubt get rich out of this
+acre.”
+
+“Don't be foolish.”
+
+And now!
+
+“Don't you think it would be nice to have a?”....
+
+And Polly unfolds a small scheme of benevolence, which is not quite
+enough to break me, and is really to be executed in an economical
+manner. “Would n't that be nice?”
+
+“Oh, yes! And where is the money to come from?”
+
+“I thought we had agreed to sell the strawberries.”
+
+“Certainly. But I think we would make more money if we sold the plants
+now.”
+
+“Well,” said Polly, concluding the whole matter, “I am going to do
+it.” And, having thus “consulted” me, Polly goes away; and I put in the
+turnip-seeds quite thick, determined to raise enough to sell. But not
+even this mercenary thought can ruffle my mind as I rake off the loamy
+bed. I notice, however, that the spring smell has gone out of the dirt.
+That went into the first crop.
+
+In this peaceful unison with yielding nature, I was a little taken
+aback to find that a new enemy had turned up. The celery had just rubbed
+through the fiery scorching of the drought, and stood a faint chance
+to grow; when I noticed on the green leaves a big green-and-black worm,
+called, I believe, the celery-worm: but I don't know who called him; I
+am sure I did not. It was almost ludicrous that he should turn up here,
+just at the end of the season, when I supposed that my war with the
+living animals was over. Yet he was, no doubt, predestinated; for he
+went to work as cheerfully as if he had arrived in June, when everything
+was fresh and vigorous. It beats me--Nature does. I doubt not, that,
+if I were to leave my garden now for a week, it would n't know me on my
+return. The patch I scratched over for the turnips, and left as clean as
+earth, is already full of ambitious “pusley,” which grows with all the
+confidence of youth and the skill of old age. It beats the serpent as an
+emblem of immortality. While all the others of us in the garden rest and
+sit in comfort a moment, upon the summit of the summer, it is as rampant
+and vicious as ever. It accepts no armistice.
+
+
+
+
+FIFTEENTH WEEK
+
+It is said that absence conquers all things, love included; but it has a
+contrary effect on a garden. I was absent for two or three weeks. I left
+my garden a paradise, as paradises go in this protoplastic world; and
+when I returned, the trail of the serpent was over it all, so to speak.
+(This is in addition to the actual snakes in it, which are large enough
+to strangle children of average size.) I asked Polly if she had seen to
+the garden while I was away, and she said she had. I found that all the
+melons had been seen to, and the early grapes and pears. The green worm
+had also seen to about half the celery; and a large flock of apparently
+perfectly domesticated chickens were roaming over the ground, gossiping
+in the hot September sun, and picking up any odd trifle that might
+be left. On the whole, the garden could not have been better seen
+to; though it would take a sharp eye to see the potato-vines amid the
+rampant grass and weeds.
+
+The new strawberry-plants, for one thing, had taken advantage of my
+absence. Every one of them had sent out as many scarlet runners as an
+Indian tribe has. Some of them had blossomed; and a few had gone so
+far as to bear ripe berries,--long, pear-shaped fruit, hanging like
+the ear-pendants of an East Indian bride. I could not but admire
+the persistence of these zealous plants, which seemed determined
+to propagate themselves both by seeds and roots, and make sure of
+immortality in some way. Even the Colfax variety was as ambitious as the
+others. After having seen the declining letter of Mr. Colfax, I did not
+suppose that this vine would run any more, and intended to root it out.
+But one can never say what these politicians mean; and I shall let this
+variety grow until after the next election, at least; although I hear
+that the fruit is small, and rather sour. If there is any variety
+of strawberries that really declines to run, and devotes itself to a
+private life of fruit-bearing, I should like to get it. I may mention
+here, since we are on politics, that the Doolittle raspberries had
+sprawled all over the strawberry-bed's: so true is it that politics
+makes strange bedfellows.
+
+But another enemy had come into the strawberries, which, after all that
+has been said in these papers, I am almost ashamed to mention. But does
+the preacher in the pulpit, Sunday after Sunday, year after year, shrink
+from speaking of sin? I refer, of course, to the greatest enemy of
+mankind, “p-sl-y.” The ground was carpeted with it. I should think that
+this was the tenth crop of the season; and it was as good as the first.
+I see no reason why our northern soil is not as prolific as that of the
+tropics, and will not produce as many crops in the year. The mistake we
+make is in trying to force things that are not natural to it. I have no
+doubt that, if we turn our attention to “pusley,” we can beat the world.
+
+I had no idea, until recently, how generally this simple and thrifty
+plant is feared and hated. Far beyond what I had regarded as the bounds
+of civilization, it is held as one of the mysteries of a fallen world;
+accompanying the home missionary on his wanderings, and preceding the
+footsteps of the Tract Society. I was not long ago in the Adirondacks.
+We had built a camp for the night, in the heart of the woods, high up on
+John's Brook and near the foot of Mount Marcy: I can see the lovely spot
+now. It was on the bank of the crystal, rocky stream, at the foot of
+high and slender falls, which poured into a broad amber basin. Out of
+this basin we had just taken trout enough for our supper, which had been
+killed, and roasted over the fire on sharp sticks, and eaten before they
+had an opportunity to feel the chill of this deceitful world. We were
+lying under the hut of spruce-bark, on fragrant hemlock-boughs, talking,
+after supper. In front of us was a huge fire of birchlogs; and over it
+we could see the top of the falls glistening in the moonlight; and the
+roar of the falls, and the brawling of the stream near us, filled all
+the ancient woods. It was a scene upon which one would think no thought
+of sin could enter. We were talking with old Phelps, the guide. Old
+Phelps is at once guide, philosopher, and friend. He knows the woods and
+streams and mountains, and their savage inhabitants, as well as we know
+all our rich relations and what they are doing; and in lonely bear-hunts
+and sable-trappings he has thought out and solved most of the problems
+of life. As he stands in his wood-gear, he is as grizzly as an old
+cedar-tree; and he speaks in a high falsetto voice, which would be
+invaluable to a boatswain in a storm at sea.
+
+We had been talking of all subjects about which rational men are
+interested,--bears, panthers, trapping, the habits of trout, the tariff,
+the internal revenue (to wit the injustice of laying such a tax on
+tobacco, and none on dogs:--“There ain't no dog in the United States,”
+ says the guide, at the top of his voice, “that earns his living”), the
+Adventists, the Gorner Grat, Horace Greeley, religion, the propagation
+of seeds in the wilderness (as, for instance, where were the seeds lying
+for ages that spring up into certain plants and flowers as soon as
+a spot is cleared anywhere in the most remote forest; and why does
+a growth of oak-trees always come up after a growth of pine has been
+removed?)--in short, we had pretty nearly reached a solution of many
+mysteries, when Phelps suddenly exclaimed with uncommon energy,-- “Wall,
+there's one thing that beats me!”
+
+“What's that?” we asked with undisguised curiosity.
+
+“That's 'pusley'!” he replied, in the tone of a man who has come to
+one door in life which is hopelessly shut, and from which he retires in
+despair.
+
+“Where it comes from I don't know, nor what to do with it. It's in my
+garden; and I can't get rid of it. It beats me.”
+
+About “pusley” the guide had no theory and no hope. A feeling of awe
+came over me, as we lay there at midnight, hushed by the sound of the
+stream and the rising wind in the spruce-tops. Then man can go nowhere
+that “pusley” will not attend him. Though he camp on the Upper Au Sable,
+or penetrate the forest where rolls the Allegash, and hear no sound save
+his own allegations, he will not escape it. It has entered the happy
+valley of Keene, although there is yet no church there, and only a
+feeble school part of the year. Sin travels faster than they that ride
+in chariots. I take my hoe, and begin; but I feel that I am warring
+against something whose roots take hold on H.
+
+By the time a man gets to be eighty, he learns that he is compassed
+by limitations, and that there has been a natural boundary set to his
+individual powers. As he goes on in life, he begins to doubt his ability
+to destroy all evil and to reform all abuses, and to suspect that there
+will be much left to do after he has done. I stepped into my garden in
+the spring, not doubting that I should be easily master of the weeds. I
+have simply learned that an institution which is at least six thousand
+years old, and I believe six millions, is not to be put down in one
+season.
+
+I have been digging my potatoes, if anybody cares to know it. I planted
+them in what are called “Early Rose,”--the rows a little less than three
+feet apart; but the vines came to an early close in the drought. Digging
+potatoes is a pleasant, soothing occupation, but not poetical. It is
+good for the mind, unless they are too small (as many of mine are),
+when it begets a want of gratitude to the bountiful earth. What small
+potatoes we all are, compared with what we might be! We don't plow deep
+enough, any of us, for one thing. I shall put in the plow next year, and
+give the tubers room enough. I think they felt the lack of it this
+year: many of them seemed ashamed to come out so small. There is great
+pleasure in turning out the brown-jacketed fellows into the sunshine
+of a royal September day, and seeing them glisten as they lie thickly
+strewn on the warm soil. Life has few such moments. But then they must
+be picked up. The picking-up, in this world, is always the unpleasant
+part of it.
+
+
+
+
+SIXTEENTH WEEK
+
+I do not hold myself bound to answer the question, Does gardening pay?
+It is so difficult to define what is meant by paying. There is a popular
+notion that, unless a thing pays, you had better let it alone; and I
+may say that there is a public opinion that will not let a man or woman
+continue in the indulgence of a fancy that does not pay. And public
+opinion is stronger than the legislature, and nearly as strong as the
+ten commandments: I therefore yield to popular clamor when I discuss the
+profit of my garden.
+
+As I look at it, you might as well ask, Does a sunset pay? I know that a
+sunset is commonly looked on as a cheap entertainment; but it is really
+one of the most expensive. It is true that we can all have front seats,
+and we do not exactly need to dress for it as we do for the opera; but
+the conditions under which it is to be enjoyed are rather dear. Among
+them I should name a good suit of clothes, including some trifling
+ornament,--not including back hair for one sex, or the parting of it in
+the middle for the other. I should add also a good dinner, well cooked
+and digestible; and the cost of a fair education, extended, perhaps,
+through generations in which sensibility and love of beauty grew. What
+I mean is, that if a man is hungry and naked, and half a savage, or with
+the love of beauty undeveloped in him, a sunset is thrown away on him:
+so that it appears that the conditions of the enjoyment of a sunset are
+as costly as anything in our civilization.
+
+Of course there is no such thing as absolute value in this world. You
+can only estimate what a thing is worth to you. Does gardening in a city
+pay? You might as well ask if it pays to keep hens, or a trotting-horse,
+or to wear a gold ring, or to keep your lawn cut, or your hair cut. It
+is as you like it. In a certain sense, it is a sort of profanation to
+consider if my garden pays, or to set a money-value upon my delight in
+it. I fear that you could not put it in money. Job had the right idea
+in his mind when he asked, “Is there any taste in the white of an
+egg?” Suppose there is not! What! shall I set a price upon the tender
+asparagus or the crisp lettuce, which made the sweet spring a reality?
+Shall I turn into merchandise the red strawberry, the pale green pea,
+the high-flavored raspberry, the sanguinary beet, that love-plant the
+tomato, and the corn which did not waste its sweetness on the desert
+air, but, after flowing in a sweet rill through all our summer life,
+mingled at last with the engaging bean in a pool of succotash? Shall
+I compute in figures what daily freshness and health and delight the
+garden yields, let alone the large crop of anticipation I gathered as
+soon as the first seeds got above ground? I appeal to any gardening
+man of sound mind, if that which pays him best in gardening is not
+that which he cannot show in his trial-balance. Yet I yield to public
+opinion, when I proceed to make such a balance; and I do it with the
+utmost confidence in figures.
+
+I select as a representative vegetable, in order to estimate the cost of
+gardening, the potato. In my statement, I shall not include the
+interest on the value of the land. I throw in the land, because it would
+otherwise have stood idle: the thing generally raised on city land is
+taxes. I therefore make the following statement of the cost and income
+of my potato-crop, a part of it estimated in connection with other
+garden labor. I have tried to make it so as to satisfy the income-tax
+collector:--
+
+    Plowing.......................................$0.50
+    Seed..........................................$1.50
+    Manure........................................ 8.00
+    Assistance in planting and digging, 3 days.... 6.75
+    Labor of self in planting, hoeing, digging,
+         picking up, 5 days at 17 cents........... 0.85
+                                                 ------
+                       Total Cost................$17.60
+
+
+    Two thousand five hundred mealy potatoes,
+         at 2 cents..............................$50.00
+    Small potatoes given to neighbor's pig........  .50
+
+                       Total return..............$50.50
+
+                  Balance, profit in cellar......$32.90
+
+
+Some of these items need explanation. I have charged nothing for my
+own time waiting for the potatoes to grow. My time in hoeing, fighting
+weeds, etc., is put in at five days: it may have been a little more. Nor
+have I put in anything for cooling drinks while hoeing. I leave this out
+from principle, because I always recommend water to others. I had some
+difficulty in fixing the rate of my own wages. It was the first time
+I had an opportunity of paying what I thought labor was worth; and I
+determined to make a good thing of it for once. I figured it right
+down to European prices,--seventeen cents a day for unskilled labor. Of
+course, I boarded myself. I ought to say that I fixed the wages after
+the work was done, or I might have been tempted to do as some masons did
+who worked for me at four dollars a day. They lay in the shade and slept
+the sleep of honest toil full half the time, at least all the time I
+was away. I have reason to believe that when the wages of mechanics are
+raised to eight and ten dollars a day, the workmen will not come at all:
+they will merely send their cards.
+
+I do not see any possible fault in the above figures. I ought to say
+that I deferred putting a value on the potatoes until I had footed up
+the debit column. This is always the safest way to do. I had twenty-five
+bushels. I roughly estimated that there are one hundred good ones to the
+bushel. Making my own market price, I asked two cents apiece for them.
+This I should have considered dirt cheap last June, when I was going
+down the rows with the hoe. If any one thinks that two cents each is
+high, let him try to raise them.
+
+Nature is “awful smart.” I intend to be complimentary in saying so. She
+shows it in little things. I have mentioned my attempt to put in a few
+modest turnips, near the close of the season. I sowed the seeds, by the
+way, in the most liberal manner. Into three or four short rows I presume
+I put enough to sow an acre; and they all came up,--came up as thick as
+grass, as crowded and useless as babies in a Chinese village. Of course,
+they had to be thinned out; that is, pretty much all pulled up; and
+it took me a long time; for it takes a conscientious man some time to
+decide which are the best and healthiest plants to spare. After all, I
+spared too many. That is the great danger everywhere in this world (it
+may not be in the next): things are too thick; we lose all in grasping
+for too much. The Scotch say, that no man ought to thin out his own
+turnips, because he will not sacrifice enough to leave room for the
+remainder to grow: he should get his neighbor, who does not care for the
+plants, to do it. But this is mere talk, and aside from the point: if
+there is anything I desire to avoid in these agricultural papers, it
+is digression. I did think that putting in these turnips so late in the
+season, when general activity has ceased, and in a remote part of the
+garden, they would pass unnoticed. But Nature never even winks, as I can
+see. The tender blades were scarcely out of the ground when she sent a
+small black fly, which seemed to have been born and held in reserve for
+this purpose,--to cut the leaves. They speedily made lace-work of the
+whole bed. Thus everything appears to have its special enemy,--except,
+perhaps, p----y: nothing ever troubles that.
+
+Did the Concord Grape ever come to more luscious perfection than this
+year? or yield so abundantly? The golden sunshine has passed into
+them, and distended their purple skins almost to bursting. Such heavy
+clusters! such bloom! such sweetness! such meat and drink in their
+round globes! What a fine fellow Bacchus would have been, if he had only
+signed the pledge when he was a young man! I have taken off clusters
+that were as compact and almost as large as the Black Hamburgs. It is
+slow work picking them. I do not see how the gatherers for the vintage
+ever get off enough. It takes so long to disentangle the bunches from
+the leaves and the interlacing vines and the supporting tendrils; and
+then I like to hold up each bunch and look at it in the sunlight, and
+get the fragrance and the bloom of it, and show it to Polly, who is
+making herself useful, as taster and companion, at the foot of the
+ladder, before dropping it into the basket. But we have other company.
+The robin, the most knowing and greedy bird out of paradise (I trust
+he will always be kept out), has discovered that the grape-crop is
+uncommonly good, and has come back, with his whole tribe and family,
+larger than it was in pea-time. He knows the ripest bunches as well as
+anybody, and tries them all. If he would take a whole bunch here and
+there, say half the number, and be off with it, I should not so much
+care. But he will not. He pecks away at all the bunches, and spoils as
+many as he can. It is time he went south.
+
+There is no prettier sight, to my eye, than a gardener on a ladder in
+his grape-arbor, in these golden days, selecting the heaviest clusters
+of grapes, and handing them down to one and another of a group of
+neighbors and friends, who stand under the shade of the leaves, flecked
+with the sunlight, and cry, “How sweet!” “What nice ones!” and the
+like,--remarks encouraging to the man on the ladder. It is great
+pleasure to see people eat grapes.
+
+Moral Truth.--I have no doubt that grapes taste best in other people's
+mouths. It is an old notion that it is easier to be generous than to
+be stingy. I am convinced that the majority of people would be generous
+from selfish motives, if they had the opportunity.
+
+Philosophical Observation.--Nothing shows one who his friends are like
+prosperity and ripe fruit. I had a good friend in the country, whom I
+almost never visited except in cherry-time. By your fruits you shall
+know them.
+
+
+
+
+
+SEVENTEENTH WEEK
+
+I like to go into the garden these warm latter days, and muse. To muse
+is to sit in the sun, and not think of anything. I am not sure but
+goodness comes out of people who bask in the sun, as it does out of a
+sweet apple roasted before the fire. The late September and October sun
+of this latitude is something like the sun of extreme Lower Italy: you
+can stand a good deal of it, and apparently soak a winter supply into
+the system. If one only could take in his winter fuel in this way! The
+next great discovery will, very likely, be the conservation of sunlight.
+In the correlation of forces, I look to see the day when the superfluous
+sunshine will be utilized; as, for instance, that which has burned up my
+celery this year will be converted into a force to work the garden.
+
+This sitting in the sun amid the evidences of a ripe year is the easiest
+part of gardening I have experienced. But what a combat has gone on
+here! What vegetable passions have run the whole gamut of ambition,
+selfishness, greed of place, fruition, satiety, and now rest here in the
+truce of exhaustion! What a battle-field, if one may look upon it
+so! The corn has lost its ammunition, and stacked arms in a slovenly,
+militia sort of style. The ground vines are torn, trampled, and
+withered; and the ungathered cucumbers, worthless melons, and golden
+squashes lie about like the spent bombs and exploded shells of a
+battle-field. So the cannon-balls lay on the sandy plain before Fort
+Fisher after the capture. So the great grassy meadow at Munich, any
+morning during the October Fest, is strewn with empty beermugs. History
+constantly repeats itself. There is a large crop of moral reflections in
+my garden, which anybody is at liberty to gather who passes this way.
+
+I have tried to get in anything that offered temptation to sin. There
+would be no thieves if there was nothing to steal; and I suppose, in the
+thieves' catechism, the provider is as bad as the thief; and, probably,
+I am to blame for leaving out a few winter pears, which some predatory
+boy carried off on Sunday. At first I was angry, and said I should like
+to have caught the urchin in the act; but, on second thought, I was glad
+I did not. The interview could not have been pleasant: I shouldn't have
+known what to do with him. The chances are, that he would have escaped
+away with his pockets full, and jibed at me from a safe distance. And,
+if I had got my hands on him, I should have been still more embarrassed.
+If I had flogged him, he would have got over it a good deal sooner than
+I should. That sort of boy does not mind castigation any more than
+he does tearing his trousers in the briers. If I had treated him with
+kindness, and conciliated him with grapes, showing him the enormity of
+his offense, I suppose he would have come the next night, and taken the
+remainder of the grapes. The truth is, that the public morality is lax
+on the subject of fruit. If anybody puts arsenic or gunpowder into his
+watermelons, he is universally denounced as a stingy old murderer by the
+community. A great many people regard growing fruit as lawful prey, who
+would not think of breaking into your cellar to take it. I found a man
+once in my raspberry-bushes, early in the season, when we were waiting
+for a dishful to ripen. Upon inquiring what he was about, he said he was
+only eating some; and the operation seemed to be so natural and simple,
+that I disliked to disturb him. And I am not very sure that one has a
+right to the whole of an abundant crop of fruit until he has gathered
+it. At least, in a city garden, one might as well conform his theory to
+the practice of the community.
+
+As for children (and it sometimes looks as if the chief products of
+my garden were small boys and hens), it is admitted that they are
+barbarians. There is no exception among them to this condition of
+barbarism. This is not to say that they are not attractive; for they
+have the virtues as well as the vices of a primitive people. It is held
+by some naturalists that the child is only a zoophyte, with a stomach,
+and feelers radiating from it in search of something to fill it. It is
+true that a child is always hungry all over: but he is also curious
+all over; and his curiosity is excited about as early as his hunger. He
+immediately begins to put out his moral feelers into the unknown and the
+infinite to discover what sort of an existence this is into which he has
+come. His imagination is quite as hungry as his stomach. And again and
+again it is stronger than his other appetites. You can easily engage
+his imagination in a story which will make him forget his dinner. He
+is credulous and superstitious, and open to all wonder. In this, he is
+exactly like the savage races. Both gorge themselves on the marvelous;
+and all the unknown is marvelous to them. I know the general impression
+is that children must be governed through their stomachs. I think they
+can be controlled quite as well through their curiosity; that being the
+more craving and imperious of the two. I have seen children follow about
+a person who told them stories, and interested them with his charming
+talk, as greedily as if his pockets had been full of bon-bons.
+
+Perhaps this fact has no practical relation to gardening; but it occurs
+to me that, if I should paper the outside of my high board fence with
+the leaves of “The Arabian Nights,” it would afford me a good deal of
+protection,--more, in fact, than spikes in the top, which tear trousers
+and encourage profanity, but do not save much fruit. A spiked fence is
+a challenge to any boy of spirit. But if the fence were papered with
+fairy-tales, would he not stop to read them until it was too late for
+him to climb into the garden? I don't know. Human nature is vicious. The
+boy might regard the picture of the garden of the Hesperides only as
+an advertisement of what was over the fence. I begin to find that the
+problem of raising fruit is nothing to that of getting it after it has
+matured. So long as the law, just in many respects, is in force against
+shooting birds and small boys, the gardener may sow in tears and reap in
+vain.
+
+The power of a boy is, to me, something fearful. Consider what he can
+do. You buy and set out a choice pear-tree; you enrich the earth for
+it; you train and trim it, and vanquish the borer, and watch its slow
+growth. At length it rewards your care by producing two or three pears,
+which you cut up and divide in the family, declaring the flavor of the
+bit you eat to be something extraordinary. The next year, the little
+tree blossoms full, and sets well; and in the autumn has on its slender,
+drooping limbs half a bushel of fruit, daily growing more delicious in
+the sun. You show it to your friends, reading to them the French name,
+which you can never remember, on the label; and you take an honest pride
+in the successful fruit of long care. That night your pears shall be
+required of you by a boy! Along comes an irresponsible urchin, who has
+not been growing much longer than the tree, with not twenty-five cents
+worth of clothing on him, and in five minutes takes off every pear, and
+retires into safe obscurity. In five minutes the remorseless boy has
+undone your work of years, and with the easy nonchalance, I doubt not,
+of any agent of fate, in whose path nothing is sacred or safe.
+
+And it is not of much consequence. The boy goes on his way,--to
+Congress, or to State Prison: in either place he will be accused of
+stealing, perhaps wrongfully. You learn, in time, that it is better to
+have had pears and lost them than not to have had pears at all. You
+come to know that the least (and rarest) part of the pleasure of raising
+fruit is the vulgar eating it. You recall your delight in conversing
+with the nurseryman, and looking at his illustrated catalogues, where
+all the pears are drawn perfect in form, and of extra size, and at that
+exact moment between ripeness and decay which it is so impossible to
+hit in practice. Fruit cannot be raised on this earth to taste as you
+imagine those pears would taste. For years you have this pleasure,
+unalloyed by any disenchanting reality. How you watch the tender twigs
+in spring, and the freshly forming bark, hovering about the healthy
+growing tree with your pruning-knife many a sunny morning! That is
+happiness. Then, if you know it, you are drinking the very wine of life;
+and when the sweet juices of the earth mount the limbs, and flow down
+the tender stem, ripening and reddening the pendent fruit, you feel that
+you somehow stand at the source of things, and have no unimportant share
+in the processes of Nature. Enter at this moment boy the destroyer,
+whose office is that of preserver as well; for, though he removes the
+fruit from your sight, it remains in your memory immortally ripe
+and desirable. The gardener needs all these consolations of a high
+philosophy.
+
+
+
+
+EIGHTEENTH WEEK
+
+Regrets are idle; yet history is one long regret. Everything might have
+turned out so differently! If Ravaillac had not been imprisoned for
+debt, he would not have stabbed Henry of Navarre. If William of Orange
+had escaped assassination by Philip's emissaries; if France had followed
+the French Calvin, and embraced Protestant Calvinism, as it came very
+near doing towards the end of the sixteenth century; if the Continental
+ammunition had not given out at Bunker's Hill; if Blucher had not “come
+up” at Waterloo,--the lesson is, that things do not come up unless they
+are planted. When you go behind the historical scenery, you find there
+is a rope and pulley to effect every transformation which has astonished
+you. It was the rascality of a minister and a contractor five years
+before that lost the battle; and the cause of the defeat was worthless
+ammunition. I should like to know how many wars have been caused by fits
+of indigestion, and how many more dynasties have been upset by the love
+of woman than by the hate of man. It is only because we are ill informed
+that anything surprises us; and we are disappointed because we expect
+that for which we have not provided.
+
+I had too vague expectations of what my garden would do of itself. A
+garden ought to produce one everything,--just as a business ought to
+support a man, and a house ought to keep itself. We had a convention
+lately to resolve that the house should keep itself; but it won't. There
+has been a lively time in our garden this summer; but it seems to me
+there is very little to show for it. It has been a terrible campaign;
+but where is the indemnity? Where are all “sass” and Lorraine? It is
+true that we have lived on the country; but we desire, besides, the
+fruits of the war. There are no onions, for one thing. I am quite
+ashamed to take people into my garden, and have them notice the absence
+of onions. It is very marked. In onion is strength; and a garden without
+it lacks flavor. The onion in its satin wrappings is among the most
+beautiful of vegetables; and it is the only one that represents the
+essence of things. It can almost be said to have a soul. You take off
+coat after coat, and the onion is still there; and, when the last one is
+removed, who dare say that the onion itself is destroyed, though you can
+weep over its departed spirit? If there is any one thing on this fallen
+earth that the angels in heaven weep over--more than another, it is the
+onion.
+
+I know that there is supposed to be a prejudice against the onion; but I
+think there is rather a cowardice in regard to it. I doubt not that all
+men and women love the onion; but few confess their love. Affection for
+it is concealed. Good New-Englanders are as shy of owning it as they
+are of talking about religion. Some people have days on which they eat
+onions,--what you might call “retreats,” or their “Thursdays.” The act
+is in the nature of a religious ceremony, an Eleusinian mystery; not a
+breath of it must get abroad. On that day they see no company; they
+deny the kiss of greeting to the dearest friend; they retire within
+themselves, and hold communion with one of the most pungent and
+penetrating manifestations of the moral vegetable world. Happy is said
+to be the family which can eat onions together. They are, for the time
+being, separate from the world, and have a harmony of aspiration. There
+is a hint here for the reformers. Let them become apostles of the onion;
+let them eat, and preach it to their fellows, and circulate tracts of it
+in the form of seeds. In the onion is the hope of universal brotherhood.
+If all men will eat onions at all times, they will come into a universal
+sympathy. Look at Italy. I hope I am not mistaken as to the cause of her
+unity. It was the Reds who preached the gospel which made it possible.
+All the Reds of Europe, all the sworn devotees of the mystic Mary Ann,
+eat of the common vegetable. Their oaths are strong with it. It is the
+food, also, of the common people of Italy. All the social atmosphere of
+that delicious land is laden with it. Its odor is a practical democracy.
+In the churches all are alike: there is one faith, one smell. The
+entrance of Victor Emanuel into Rome is only the pompous proclamation of
+a unity which garlic had already accomplished; and yet we, who boast of
+our democracy, eat onions in secret.
+
+I now see that I have left out many of the most moral elements. Neither
+onions, parsnips, carrots, nor cabbages are here. I have never seen a
+garden in the autumn before, without the uncouth cabbage in it; but my
+garden gives the impression of a garden without a head. The cabbage is
+the rose of Holland. I admire the force by which it compacts its crisp
+leaves into a solid head. The secret of it would be priceless to the
+world. We should see less expansive foreheads with nothing within.
+Even the largest cabbages are not always the best. But I mention these
+things, not from any sympathy I have with the vegetables named, but
+to show how hard it is to go contrary to the expectations of society.
+Society expects every man to have certain things in his garden. Not to
+raise cabbage is as if one had no pew in church. Perhaps we shall come
+some day to free churches and free gardens; when I can show my neighbor
+through my tired garden, at the end of the season, when skies are
+overcast, and brown leaves are swirling down, and not mind if he does
+raise his eyebrows when he observes, “Ah! I see you have none of this,
+and of that.” At present we want the moral courage to plant only what
+we need; to spend only what will bring us peace, regardless of what is
+going on over the fence. We are half ruined by conformity; but we should
+be wholly ruined without it; and I presume I shall make a garden next
+year that will be as popular as possible.
+
+And this brings me to what I see may be a crisis in life. I begin
+to feel the temptation of experiment. Agriculture, horticulture,
+floriculture,--these are vast fields, into which one may wander away,
+and never be seen more. It seemed to me a very simple thing, this
+gardening; but it opens up astonishingly. It is like the infinite
+possibilities in worsted-work. Polly sometimes says to me, “I wish you
+would call at Bobbin's, and match that skein of worsted for me, when you
+are in town.” Time was, I used to accept such a commission with alacrity
+and self-confidence. I went to Bobbin's, and asked one of his young men,
+with easy indifference, to give me some of that. The young man, who is
+as handsome a young man as ever I looked at, and who appears to own the
+shop, and whose suave superciliousness would be worth everything to a
+cabinet minister who wanted to repel applicants for place, says, “I have
+n't an ounce: I have sent to Paris, and I expect it every day. I have
+a good deal of difficulty in getting that shade in my assortment.” To
+think that he is in communication with Paris, and perhaps with Persia!
+Respect for such a being gives place to awe. I go to another shop,
+holding fast to my scarlet clew. There I am shown a heap of stuff, with
+more colors and shades than I had supposed existed in all the world.
+What a blaze of distraction! I have been told to get as near the shade
+as I could; and so I compare and contrast, till the whole thing seems to
+me about of one color. But I can settle my mind on nothing. The affair
+assumes a high degree of importance. I am satisfied with nothing but
+perfection. I don't know what may happen if the shade is not matched. I
+go to another shop, and another, and another. At last a pretty girl, who
+could make any customer believe that green is blue, matches the shade in
+a minute. I buy five cents worth. That was the order. Women are the
+most economical persons that ever were. I have spent two hours in this
+five-cent business; but who shall say they were wasted, when I take the
+stuff home, and Polly says it is a perfect match, and looks so pleased,
+and holds it up with the work, at arm's length, and turns her head one
+side, and then takes her needle, and works it in? Working in, I can see,
+my own obligingness and amiability with every stitch. Five cents is dirt
+cheap for such a pleasure.
+
+The things I may do in my garden multiply on my vision. How fascinating
+have the catalogues of the nurserymen become! Can I raise all those
+beautiful varieties, each one of which is preferable to the other?
+Shall I try all the kinds of grapes, and all the sorts of pears? I have
+already fifteen varieties of strawberries (vines); and I have no idea
+that I have hit the right one. Must I subscribe to all the magazines and
+weekly papers which offer premiums of the best vines? Oh, that all
+the strawberries were rolled into one, that I could inclose all its
+lusciousness in one bite! Oh for the good old days when a strawberry
+was a strawberry, and there was no perplexity about it! There are more
+berries now than churches; and no one knows what to believe. I have seen
+gardens which were all experiment, given over to every new thing, and
+which produced little or nothing to the owners, except the pleasure of
+expectation. People grow pear-trees at great expense of time and money,
+which never yield them more than four pears to the tree. The fashions
+of ladies' bonnets are nothing to the fashions of nurserymen. He who
+attempts to follow them has a business for life; but his life may be
+short. If I enter upon this wide field of horticultural experiment,
+I shall leave peace behind; and I may expect the ground to open, and
+swallow me and all my fortune. May Heaven keep me to the old roots and
+herbs of my forefathers! Perhaps in the world of modern reforms this is
+not possible; but I intend now to cultivate only the standard things,
+and learn to talk knowingly of the rest. Of course, one must keep up
+a reputation. I have seen people greatly enjoy themselves, and elevate
+themselves in their own esteem, in a wise and critical talk about all
+the choice wines, while they were sipping a decoction, the original cost
+of which bore no relation to the price of grapes.
+
+
+
+
+NINETEENTH WEEK
+
+The closing scenes are not necessarily funereal. A garden should be
+got ready for winter as well as for summer. When one goes into
+winter-quarters, he wants everything neat and trim. Expecting high
+winds, we bring everything into close reef. Some men there are who never
+shave (if they are so absurd as ever to shave), except when they go
+abroad, and who do not take care to wear polished boots in the bosoms of
+their families. I like a man who shaves (next to one who does n't shave)
+to satisfy his own conscience, and not for display, and who dresses as
+neatly at home as he does anywhere. Such a man will be likely to put his
+garden in complete order before the snow comes, so that its last days
+shall not present a scene of melancholy ruin and decay.
+
+I confess that, after such an exhausting campaign, I felt a great
+temptation to retire, and call it a drawn engagement. But better
+counsels prevailed. I determined that the weeds should not sleep on the
+field of battle. I routed them out, and leveled their works. I am master
+of the situation. If I have made a desert, I at least have peace; but
+it is not quite a desert. The strawberries, the raspberries, the celery,
+the turnips, wave green above the clean earth, with no enemy in sight.
+In these golden October days no work is more fascinating than this
+getting ready for spring. The sun is no longer a burning enemy, but a
+friend, illuminating all the open space, and warming the mellow soil.
+And the pruning and clearing away of rubbish, and the fertilizing, go on
+with something of the hilarity of a wake, rather than the despondency of
+other funerals. When the wind begins to come out of the northwest of set
+purpose, and to sweep the ground with low and searching fierceness, very
+different from the roistering, jolly bluster of early fall, I have put
+the strawberries under their coverlet of leaves, pruned the grape-vines
+and laid them under the soil, tied up the tender plants, given the fruit
+trees a good, solid meal about the roots; and so I turn away, writing
+Resurgam on the gatepost. And Calvin, aware that the summer is past and
+the harvest is ended, and that a mouse in the kitchen is worth two birds
+gone south, scampers away to the house with his tail in the air.
+
+And yet I am not perfectly at rest in my mind. I know that this is only
+a truce until the parties recover their exhausted energies. All winter
+long the forces of chemistry will be mustering under ground, repairing
+the losses, calling up the reserves, getting new strength from my
+surface-fertilizing bounty, and making ready for the spring campaign.
+They will open it before I am ready: while the snow is scarcely melted,
+and the ground is not passable, they will begin to move on my works; and
+the fight will commence. Yet how deceitfully it will open to the music
+of birds and the soft enchantment of the spring mornings! I shall even
+be permitted to win a few skirmishes: the secret forces will even wait
+for me to plant and sow, and show my full hand, before they come on in
+heavy and determined assault. There are already signs of an internecine
+fight with the devil-grass, which has intrenched itself in a
+considerable portion of my garden-patch. It contests the ground inch by
+inch; and digging it out is very much such labor as eating a piece of
+choke-cherry pie with the stones all in. It is work, too, that I know
+by experience I shall have to do alone. Every man must eradicate his own
+devil-grass. The neighbors who have leisure to help you in grape-picking
+time are all busy when devil-grass is most aggressive. My neighbors'
+visits are well timed: it is only their hens which have seasons for
+their own.
+
+I am told that abundant and rank weeds are signs of a rich soil; but
+I have noticed that a thin, poor soil grows little but weeds. I am
+inclined to think that the substratum is the same, and that the only
+choice in this world is what kind of weeds you will have. I am not much
+attracted by the gaunt, flavorless mullein, and the wiry thistle of
+upland country pastures, where the grass is always gray, as if the world
+were already weary and sick of life. The awkward, uncouth wickedness of
+remote country-places, where culture has died out after the first crop,
+is about as disagreeable as the ranker and richer vice of city life,
+forced by artificial heat and the juices of an overfed civilization.
+There is no doubt that, on the whole, the rich soil is the best: the
+fruit of it has body and flavor. To what affluence does a woman (to
+take an instance, thank Heaven, which is common) grow, with favoring
+circumstances, under the stimulus of the richest social and intellectual
+influences! I am aware that there has been a good deal said in poetry
+about the fringed gentian and the harebell of rocky districts and
+waysides, and I know that it is possible for maidens to bloom in very
+slight soil into a wild-wood grace and beauty; yet, the world through,
+they lack that wealth of charms, that tropic affluence of both person
+and mind, which higher and more stimulating culture brings,--the passion
+as well as the soul glowing in the Cloth-of-Gold rose. Neither persons
+nor plants are ever fully themselves until they are cultivated to
+their highest. I, for one, have no fear that society will be too much
+enriched. The only question is about keeping down the weeds; and I
+have learned by experience, that we need new sorts of hoes, and more
+disposition to use them.
+
+Moral Deduction.--The difference between soil and society is evident. We
+bury decay in the earth; we plant in it the perishing; we feed it with
+offensive refuse: but nothing grows out of it that is not clean; it
+gives us back life and beauty for our rubbish. Society returns us what
+we give it.
+
+Pretending to reflect upon these things, but in reality watching the
+blue-jays, who are pecking at the purple berries of the woodbine on the
+south gable, I approach the house. Polly is picking up chestnuts on the
+sward, regardless of the high wind which rattles them about her head and
+upon the glass roof of her winter-garden. The garden, I see, is filled
+with thrifty plants, which will make it always summer there. The callas
+about the fountain will be in flower by Christmas: the plant appears
+to keep that holiday in her secret heart all summer. I close the outer
+windows as we go along, and congratulate myself that we are ready for
+winter. For the winter-garden I have no responsibility: Polly has entire
+charge of it. I am only required to keep it heated, and not too hot
+either; to smoke it often for the death of the bugs; to water it once
+a day; to move this and that into the sun and out of the sun pretty
+constantly: but she does all the work. We never relinquish that theory.
+
+As we pass around the house, I discover a boy in the ravine filling a
+bag with chestnuts and hickorynuts. They are not plenty this year; and
+I suggest the propriety of leaving some for us. The boy is a little
+slow to take the idea: but he has apparently found the picking poor, and
+exhausted it; for, as he turns away down the glen, he hails me with,
+
+“Mister, I say, can you tell me where I can find some walnuts?”
+
+The coolness of this world grows upon me. It is time to go in and light
+a wood-fire on the hearth.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CALVIN
+
+
+
+
+NOTE.--The following brief Memoir of one of the characters in this book
+is added by his friend, in the hope that the record of an exemplary fife
+in an humble sphere may be of some service to the world.
+
+   HARTFORD, January, 1880.
+
+
+
+
+CALVIN
+
+A STUDY OF CHARACTER
+
+
+Calvin is dead. His life, long to him, but short for the rest of us, was
+not marked by startling adventures, but his character was so uncommon
+and his qualities were so worthy of imitation, that I have been asked
+by those who personally knew him to set down my recollections of his
+career.
+
+His origin and ancestry were shrouded in mystery; even his age was a
+matter of pure conjecture. Although he was of the Maltese race, I have
+reason to suppose that he was American by birth as he certainly was in
+sympathy. Calvin was given to me eight years ago by Mrs. Stowe, but she
+knew nothing of his age or origin. He walked into her house one day
+out of the great unknown and became at once at home, as if he had been
+always a friend of the family. He appeared to have artistic and literary
+tastes, and it was as if he had inquired at the door if that was the
+residence of the author of “Uncle Tom's Cabin,” and, upon being assured
+that it was, bad decided to dwell there. This is, of course, fanciful,
+for his antecedents were wholly unknown, but in his time he could hardly
+have been in any household where he would not have heard “Uncle Tom's
+Cabin” talked about. When he came to Mrs. Stowe, he was as large as he
+ever was, and apparently as old as he ever became. Yet there was in him
+no appearance of age; he was in the happy maturity of all his powers,
+and you would rather have said that in that maturity he had found the
+secret of perpetual youth. And it was as difficult to believe that
+he would ever be aged as it was to imagine that he had ever been in
+immature youth. There was in him a mysterious perpetuity.
+
+After some years, when Mrs. Stowe made her winter home in Florida,
+Calvin came to live with us. From the first moment, he fell into the
+ways of the house and assumed a recognized position in the family,--I
+say recognized, because after he became known he was always inquired for
+by visitors, and in the letters to the other members of the family he
+always received a message. Although the least obtrusive of beings, his
+individuality always made itself felt.
+
+His personal appearance had much to do with this, for he was of royal
+mould, and had an air of high breeding. He was large, but he had nothing
+of the fat grossness of the celebrated Angora family; though powerful,
+he was exquisitely proportioned, and as graceful in every movement as a
+young leopard. When he stood up to open a door--he opened all the doors
+with old-fashioned latches--he was portentously tall, and when stretched
+on the rug before the fire he seemed too long for this world--as indeed
+he was. His coat was the finest and softest I have ever seen, a shade
+of quiet Maltese; and from his throat downward, underneath, to the white
+tips of his feet, he wore the whitest and most delicate ermine; and no
+person was ever more fastidiously neat. In his finely formed head you
+saw something of his aristocratic character; the ears were small and
+cleanly cut, there was a tinge of pink in the nostrils, his face
+was handsome, and the expression of his countenance exceedingly
+intelligent--I should call it even a sweet expression, if the term were
+not inconsistent with his look of alertness and sagacity.
+
+It is difficult to convey a just idea of his gayety in connection with
+his dignity and gravity, which his name expressed. As we know nothing
+of his family, of course it will be understood that Calvin was his
+Christian name. He had times of relaxation into utter playfulness,
+delighting in a ball of yarn, catching sportively at stray ribbons
+when his mistress was at her toilet, and pursuing his own tail, with
+hilarity, for lack of anything better. He could amuse himself by the
+hour, and he did not care for children; perhaps something in his past
+was present to his memory. He had absolutely no bad habits, and his
+disposition was perfect. I never saw him exactly angry, though I have
+seen his tail grow to an enormous size when a strange cat appeared
+upon his lawn. He disliked cats, evidently regarding them as feline and
+treacherous, and he had no association with them. Occasionally there
+would be heard a night concert in the shrubbery. Calvin would ask to
+have the door opened, and then you would hear a rush and a “pestzt,” and
+the concert would explode, and Calvin would quietly come in and resume
+his seat on the hearth. There was no trace of anger in his manner, but
+he would n't have any of that about the house. He had the rare virtue
+of magnanimity. Although he had fixed notions about his own rights, and
+extraordinary persistency in getting them, he never showed temper at a
+repulse; he simply and firmly persisted till he had what he wanted.
+His diet was one point; his idea was that of the scholars about
+dictionaries,--to “get the best.” He knew as well as any one what was in
+the house, and would refuse beef if turkey was to be had; and if there
+were oysters, he would wait over the turkey to see if the oysters would
+not be forthcoming. And yet he was not a gross gourmand; he would eat
+bread if he saw me eating it, and thought he was not being imposed on.
+His habits of feeding, also, were refined; he never used a knife, and he
+would put up his hand and draw the fork down to his mouth as gracefully
+as a grown person. Unless necessity compelled, he would not eat in the
+kitchen, but insisted upon his meals in the dining-room, and would
+wait patiently, unless a stranger were present; and then he was sure to
+importune the visitor, hoping that the latter was ignorant of the rule
+of the house, and would give him something. They used to say that he
+preferred as his table-cloth on the floor a certain well-known church
+journal; but this was said by an Episcopalian. So far as I know, he had
+no religious prejudices, except that he did not like the association
+with Romanists. He tolerated the servants, because they belonged to the
+house, and would sometimes linger by the kitchen stove; but the moment
+visitors came in he arose, opened the door, and marched into the
+drawing-room. Yet he enjoyed the company of his equals, and never
+withdrew, no matter how many callers--whom he recognized as of his
+society--might come into the drawing-room. Calvin was fond of company,
+but he wanted to choose it; and I have no doubt that his was an
+aristocratic fastidiousness rather than one of faith. It is so with most
+people.
+
+The intelligence of Calvin was something phenomenal, in his rank of
+life. He established a method of communicating his wants, and even some
+of his sentiments; and he could help himself in many things. There was
+a furnace register in a retired room, where he used to go when he wished
+to be alone, that he always opened when he desired more heat; but he
+never shut it, any more than he shut the door after himself. He could
+do almost everything but speak; and you would declare sometimes that you
+could see a pathetic longing to do that in his intelligent face. I have
+no desire to overdraw his qualities, but if there was one thing in him
+more noticeable than another, it was his fondness for nature. He could
+content himself for hours at a low window, looking into the ravine and
+at the great trees, noting the smallest stir there; he delighted, above
+all things, to accompany me walking about the garden, hearing the birds,
+getting the smell of the fresh earth, and rejoicing in the sunshine.
+He followed me and gamboled like a dog, rolling over on the turf and
+exhibiting his delight in a hundred ways. If I worked, he sat and
+watched me, or looked off over the bank, and kept his ear open to the
+twitter in the cherry-trees. When it stormed, he was sure to sit at the
+window, keenly watching the rain or the snow, glancing up and down at
+its falling; and a winter tempest always delighted him. I think he was
+genuinely fond of birds, but, so far as I know, he usually confined
+himself to one a day; he never killed, as some sportsmen do, for the
+sake of killing, but only as civilized people do,--from necessity.
+He was intimate with the flying-squirrels who dwell in the
+chestnut-trees,--too intimate, for almost every day in the summer he
+would bring in one, until he nearly discouraged them. He was, indeed,
+a superb hunter, and would have been a devastating one, if his bump of
+destructiveness had not been offset by a bump of moderation. There was
+very little of the brutality of the lower animals about him; I don't
+think he enjoyed rats for themselves, but he knew his business, and for
+the first few months of his residence with us he waged an awful campaign
+against the horde, and after that his simple presence was sufficient to
+deter them from coming on the premises. Mice amused him, but he usually
+considered them too small game to be taken seriously; I have seen
+him play for an hour with a mouse, and then let him go with a royal
+condescension. In this whole, matter of “getting a living,” Calvin was a
+great contrast to the rapacity of the age in which he lived.
+
+I hesitate a little to speak of his capacity for friendship and the
+affectionateness of his nature, for I know from his own reserve that he
+would not care to have it much talked about. We understood each other
+perfectly, but we never made any fuss about it; when I spoke his name
+and snapped my fingers, he came to me; when I returned home at night, he
+was pretty sure to be waiting for me near the gate, and would rise
+and saunter along the walk, as if his being there were purely
+accidental,--so shy was he commonly of showing feeling; and when I
+opened the door, he never rushed in, like a cat, but loitered, and
+lounged, as if he had no intention of going in, but would condescend to.
+And yet, the fact was, he knew dinner was ready, and he was bound to be
+there. He kept the run of dinner-time. It happened sometimes, during our
+absence in the summer, that dinner would be early, and Calvin, walking
+about the grounds, missed it and came in late. But he never made a
+mistake the second day. There was one thing he never did,--he never
+rushed through an open doorway. He never forgot his dignity. If he had
+asked to have the door opened, and was eager to go out, he always went
+deliberately; I can see him now standing on the sill, looking about at
+the sky as if he was thinking whether it were worth while to take an
+umbrella, until he was near having his tail shut in.
+
+His friendship was rather constant than demonstrative. When we returned
+from an absence of nearly two years, Calvin welcomed us with evident
+pleasure, but showed his satisfaction rather by tranquil happiness than
+by fuming about. He had the faculty of making us glad to get home. It
+was his constancy that was so attractive. He liked companionship, but he
+wouldn't be petted, or fussed over, or sit in any one's lap a moment; he
+always extricated himself from such familiarity with dignity and with no
+show of temper. If there was any petting to be done, however, he
+chose to do it. Often he would sit looking at me, and then, moved by a
+delicate affection, come and pull at my coat and sleeve until he could
+touch my face with his nose, and then go away contented. He had a habit
+of coming to my study in the morning, sitting quietly by my side or on
+the table for hours, watching the pen run over the paper, occasionally
+swinging his tail round for a blotter, and then going to sleep among the
+papers by the inkstand. Or, more rarely, he would watch the writing from
+a perch on my shoulder. Writing always interested him, and, until he
+understood it, he wanted to hold the pen.
+
+He always held himself in a kind of reserve with his friend, as if he
+had said, “Let us respect our personality, and not make a 'mess' of
+friendship.” He saw, with Emerson, the risk of degrading it to trivial
+conveniency. “Why insist on rash personal relations with your friend?”
+ “Leave this touching and clawing.” Yet I would not give an unfair notion
+of his aloofness, his fine sense of the sacredness of the me and
+the not-me. And, at the risk of not being believed, I will relate an
+incident, which was often repeated. Calvin had the practice of passing
+a portion of the night in the contemplation of its beauties, and would
+come into our chamber over the roof of the conservatory through the open
+window, summer and winter, and go to sleep on the foot of my bed. He
+would do this always exactly in this way; he never was content to stay
+in the chamber if we compelled him to go upstairs and through the door.
+He had the obstinacy of General Grant. But this is by the way. In the
+morning, he performed his toilet and went down to breakfast with the
+rest of the family. Now, when the mistress was absent from home, and at
+no other time, Calvin would come in the morning, when the bell rang, to
+the head of the bed, put up his feet and look into my face, follow me
+about when I rose, “assist” at the dressing, and in many purring ways
+show his fondness, as if he had plainly said, “I know that she has gone
+away, but I am here.” Such was Calvin in rare moments.
+
+He had his limitations. Whatever passion he had for nature, he had no
+conception of art. There was sent to him once a fine and very expressive
+cat's head in bronze, by Fremiet. I placed it on the floor. He regarded
+it intently, approached it cautiously and crouchingly, touched it with
+his nose, perceived the fraud, turned away abruptly, and never would
+notice it afterward. On the whole, his life was not only a successful
+one, but a happy one. He never had but one fear, so far as I know: he
+had a mortal and a reasonable terror of plumbers. He would never stay in
+the house when they were here. No coaxing could quiet him. Of course he
+did n't share our fear about their charges, but he must have had some
+dreadful experience with them in that portion of his life which is
+unknown to us. A plumber was to him the devil, and I have no doubt that,
+in his scheme, plumbers were foreordained to do him mischief.
+
+In speaking of his worth, it has never occurred to me to estimate Calvin
+by the worldly standard. I know that it is customary now, when any
+one dies, to ask how much he was worth, and that no obituary in the
+newspapers is considered complete without such an estimate. The plumbers
+in our house were one day overheard to say that, “They say that she says
+that he says that he wouldn't take a hundred dollars for him.” It is
+unnecessary to say that I never made such a remark, and that, so far as
+Calvin was concerned, there was no purchase in money.
+
+As I look back upon it, Calvin's life seems to me a fortunate one, for
+it was natural and unforced. He ate when he was hungry, slept when he
+was sleepy, and enjoyed existence to the very tips of his toes and the
+end of his expressive and slow-moving tail. He delighted to roam about
+the garden, and stroll among the trees, and to lie on the green grass
+and luxuriate in all the sweet influences of summer. You could never
+accuse him of idleness, and yet he knew the secret of repose. The poet
+who wrote so prettily of him that his little life was rounded with a
+sleep, understated his felicity; it was rounded with a good many. His
+conscience never seemed to interfere with his slumbers. In fact, he had
+good habits and a contented mind. I can see him now walk in at the study
+door, sit down by my chair, bring his tail artistically about his feet,
+and look up at me with unspeakable happiness in his handsome face. I
+often thought that he felt the dumb limitation which denied him the
+power of language. But since he was denied speech, he scorned the
+inarticulate mouthings of the lower animals. The vulgar mewing and
+yowling of the cat species was beneath him; he sometimes uttered a
+sort of articulate and well-bred ejaculation, when he wished to call
+attention to something that he considered remarkable, or to some want of
+his, but he never went whining about. He would sit for hours at a closed
+window, when he desired to enter, without a murmur, and when it was
+opened, he never admitted that he had been impatient by “bolting” in.
+Though speech he had not, and the unpleasant kind of utterance given to
+his race he would not use, he had a mighty power of purr to express his
+measureless content with congenial society. There was in him a musical
+organ with stops of varied power and expression, upon which I have no
+doubt he could have performed Scarlatti's celebrated cat's-fugue.
+
+Whether Calvin died of old age, or was carried off by one of the
+diseases incident to youth, it is impossible to say; for his departure
+was as quiet as his advent was mysterious. I only know that he appeared
+to us in this world in his perfect stature and beauty, and that after a
+time, like Lohengrin, he withdrew. In his illness there was nothing more
+to be regretted than in all his blameless life. I suppose there never
+was an illness that had more of dignity, and sweetness and resignation
+in it. It came on gradually, in a kind of listlessness and want of
+appetite. An alarming symptom was his preference for the warmth of a
+furnace-register to the lively sparkle of the open woodfire. Whatever
+pain he suffered, he bore it in silence, and seemed only anxious not to
+obtrude his malady. We tempted him with the delicacies of the season,
+but it soon became impossible for him to eat, and for two weeks he
+ate or drank scarcely anything. Sometimes he made an effort to take
+something, but it was evident that he made the effort to please us. The
+neighbors--and I am convinced that the advice of neighbors is never good
+for anything--suggested catnip. He would n't even smell it. We had the
+attendance of an amateur practitioner of medicine, whose real office
+was the cure of souls, but nothing touched his case. He took what was
+offered, but it was with the air of one to whom the time for pellets was
+passed. He sat or lay day after day almost motionless, never once making
+a display of those vulgar convulsions or contortions of pain which are
+so disagreeable to society. His favorite place was on the brightest
+spot of a Smyrna rug by the conservatory, where the sunlight fell and
+he could hear the fountain play. If we went to him and exhibited our
+interest in his condition, he always purred in recognition of our
+sympathy. And when I spoke his name, he looked up with an expression
+that said, “I understand it, old fellow, but it's no use.” He was to all
+who came to visit him a model of calmness and patience in affliction.
+
+I was absent from home at the last, but heard by daily postal-card of
+his failing condition; and never again saw him alive. One sunny morning,
+he rose from his rug, went into the conservatory (he was very thin
+then), walked around it deliberately, looking at all the plants he knew,
+and then went to the bay-window in the dining-room, and stood a long
+time looking out upon the little field, now brown and sere, and toward
+the garden, where perhaps the happiest hours of his life had been spent.
+It was a last look. He turned and walked away, laid himself down upon
+the bright spot in the rug, and quietly died.
+
+It is not too much to say that a little shock went through the
+neighborhood when it was known that Calvin was dead, so marked was his
+individuality; and his friends, one after another, came in to see him.
+There was no sentimental nonsense about his obsequies; it was felt
+that any parade would have been distasteful to him. John, who acted
+as undertaker, prepared a candle-box for him and I believe assumed
+a professional decorum; but there may have been the usual levity
+underneath, for I heard that he remarked in the kitchen that it was the
+“driest wake he ever attended.” Everybody, however, felt a fondness for
+Calvin, and regarded him with a certain respect. Between him and Bertha
+there existed a great friendship, and she apprehended his nature; she
+used to say that sometimes she was afraid of him, he looked at her so
+intelligently; she was never certain that he was what he appeared to be.
+
+When I returned, they had laid Calvin on a table in an upper chamber by
+an open window. It was February. He reposed in a candle-box, lined about
+the edge with evergreen, and at his head stood a little wine-glass
+with flowers. He lay with his head tucked down in his arms,--a favorite
+position of his before the fire,--as if asleep in the comfort of his
+soft and exquisite fur. It was the involuntary exclamation of those who
+saw him, “How natural he looks!” As for myself, I said nothing. John
+buried him under the twin hawthorn-trees,--one white and the other
+pink,--in a spot where Calvin was fond of lying and listening to the hum
+of summer insects and the twitter of birds.
+
+Perhaps I have failed to make appear the individuality of character
+that was so evident to those who knew him. At any rate, I have set down
+nothing concerning him, but the literal truth. He was always a mystery.
+I did not know whence he came; I do not know whither he has gone. I
+would not weave one spray of falsehood in the wreath I lay upon his
+grave.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Summer in a Garden and Calvin A Study
+Of Character, by Charles Dudley Warner
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