Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor Volume II Part 7

GARDEN ETHICS.

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 snake-gra.s.s,--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 gra.s.s 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 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 these 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 the a little 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 a 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 cuc.u.mbers (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 the 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 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."--_My Summer in a Garden_.

THE PLUMBER.

Speaking of the philosophical temper, there is no cla.s.s of men whose society is to be more 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 any thing 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 any thing 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!--_My Summer in a Garden_.

FRANCES LEE PRATT.

(BORN, 1830.)

CAPTAIN BEN'S CHOICE.

An old red house on a rocky sh.o.r.e, with a fisherman's blue boat rocking on the bay, and two white sails glistening far away over the water.

Above, the blue, shining sky; and below, the blue shining sea.

"It seems clever to have a pleasant day," said Mrs. Davids, sighing.

Mrs. Davids said every thing with a sigh, and now she wiped her eyes also on her calico ap.r.o.n. She was a woman with a complexion like faded sea-weed, who seemed always pitying herself.

"I tell them," said she, "I have had real hard luck. My husband is buried away off in California, and my son died in the army, and he is buried away down South. Neither one of them is buried together."

Then she sighed again. Twice, this time.

"And so," she continued, taking out a pinch of bayberry snuff, "I am left alone in the world. _Alone_, I say! why, I've got a daughter, but she is away out West. She is married to an engineer-man. And I've got two grandchildren."

Mrs. Davids took the pinch of bayberry and shook her head, looking as though that was the "hardest luck" of all.

"Well, everybody has to have their pesters, and you'll have to take yours," rejoined Miss Persis Tame, taking a pinch of snuff--the real Maccaboy--twice as large, with twice as fierce an action. "I don't know what it is to bury children, nor to lose a husband; I s'pose I don't; but I know what it is to be jammed round the world and not have a ruff to stick my head under. I wish I had all the money I ever spent travelling,--and _that's_ twelve dollars," she continued, regretfully.

"Why in the world don't you marry and have a home of your own," sighed Mrs. Davids.

"Well, I don't _expect_ to marry. I don't know as I do at my time of life," responded the spinster. "I rather guess my day for chances is gone by."

"You ain't such a dreadful sight older than I am, though," replied Mrs.

Davids, reflectively.

"Not so old by two full years," returned Miss Tame, taking another smart pinch of snuff, as though it touched the empty spot in her heart and did it good. "But _you_ ain't looking out for opportunities yet, I suppose."

Mrs. Davids sighed, evasively. "We can't tell what is before us. There is more than one man in want of a wife."

As though to point her words, Captain Ben Lundy came in sight on the beach, his head a long way forward and his shambling feet trying in vain to keep up.

"Thirteen months and a half since Lyddy was buried," continued Mrs.

Davids, accepting this application to her words, "and there is Captain Ben taking up with just what housekeeper he can get, and _no_ housekeeper at all. It would be an excellent home for you, Persis.

Captain Ben always had the name of making a kind husband."

She sighed again, whether from regret for the bereaved man, or for the mult.i.tude of women bereft of such a husband.

By this time Captain Ben's head was at the door.

"Morning!" said he, while his feet were coming up. "Quite an accident down here below the lighthouse last night. Schooner ran ash.o.r.e in the blow and broke all up into kindling-wood in less than no time. Captain Tisdale's been out looking for dead bodies ever since daylight."

"I knowed it," sighed Mrs. Davids. "I heard a rushing sound sometime about the break of day that waked me out of a sound sleep, and I knowed then there was a spirit leaving its body. I heard it the night Davids went, or I expect I did. It must have been very nearly at that time."

"Well, I guess it wasn't a spirit, last night," said Captain Ben; "for as I was going on to say, after searching back and forth, Captain Tisdale came upon the folks, a man and a boy, rolled up in their wet blankets asleep behind the life-boat house. He said he felt like he could shake them for staying out in the wet. Wrecks always make for the lighthouse, so he s'posed those ones were drowned to death, sure enough."

"Oh, then it couldn't have been them, I was warned of!" returned Mrs.

Davids, looking as though she regretted it. "It was right over my head, and I waked up just as the thing was rushing past. You haven't heard, have you," she continued, "whether or no there was any other damage done by the gale?"

"I don't know whether you would call it damage exactly," returned Captain Ben; "but Loizah Mullers got so scared she left me and went home. She said she couldn't stay and run the chance of another of our coast blows, and off she trapsed."

Mrs. Davids sighed like November. "So you have some hard luck as well as myself. I don't suppose you can _get_ a housekeeper to keep her long,"

said she, dismally.

"Abel Grimes tells me it is enough sight easier getting wives than housekeepers, and I'm some of a mind to try that tack," replied Captain Ben, smiling grimly.

Mrs. Davids put up her hand to feel of her back hair, and smoothed down her ap.r.o.n; while Miss Persis Tame blushed like a withered rose, and turned her eyes modestly out of the window.

"I am _so_. But the difficulty is, who will it be? There are so many to select from it is fairly bothersome," continued Captain Ben, winking fast and looking as though he was made of dry corncobs and hay.

Miss Persis Tame turned about abruptly. "The land alive!" she e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed with such sudden emphasis that the dishes shook on their shelves and Captain Ben in his chair. "It makes me mad as a March hare to hear men go on as though all they'd got to do was to throw down their handkerchers to a woman, and, no matter who, she'd spring and run to pick it up. It is always 'Who will I marry?' and not 'Who will marry me?'"

"Why, there is twice the number of widders that there is of widderers here at the P'int. That was what was in my mind," said Captain Ben, in a tone of meek apology. "There is the Widow Keens, she that was Azubah Muchmore. I don't know but what she would do; Lyddy used to think every thing of her, and she is a first-rate of a housekeeper."