Still, I cannot easily persuade myself that a Society for the Protection of Weeds is even now necessary.  I have great faith in weeds.  If they are given a fair chance, I should back them against any cultivated flower or vegetable I know.  Anyone who has ever had a garden knows that, while it is necessary to work hard to keep the shepherd’s purse and the chickweed and the dandelion and the wartwort and the hawkweed and the valerian from growing, one has to take no such pains in order to keep the lettuces and the potatoes from growing.  For myself, I should, in the vulgar phrase, back the shepherd’s purse against the lettuces every time.  If the weeds in the garden fail to make us radiantly happy, it is not because they are weeds, but because they are the wrong weeds.  Why not the ground-ivy instead of the shepherd’s purse, that lank intruder that not only is a weed but looks like one?  Why not bee-orchises for wartwort, and gentians for chickweed?  I have no fault to find with the foxgloves under the apple-tree or with the ivy-leaved toad-flax that hangs with its elfin flowers from every cranny in the wall.  But I protest against the dandelions and the superfluity of groundsel.  I undertake that, if rest-harrow and scabious and corn-cockle invade the garden, I shall never use a hoe on them.  More than this, if only the right weeds settled in the garden, I should grow no other flowers.  But shepherd’s purse!  Compared with it, a cabbage is a posy for a bridesmaid, and sprouting broccoli a bouquet for a prima donna.  After all, one ought to be allowed to choose the weeds for one’s own garden.  But then when one chooses them, one no longer calls them weeds.  The periwinkle, the primrose and the mallow—­we spare them with our tongue as with our hoe.  This, perhaps, suggests the only definition of a weed that is possible.  A weed is a plant we hoe up or, rather, that we try to hoe up.  A flower or a vegetable is a plant that the hoe deliberately misses.  But, in spite of the hoe, the weeds have it.  They survive and multiply like a subject race....  Well, perhaps better a weed than a geranium.

XXI

A JUROR IN WAITING

The train was crowded with jurymen.  Every one of them was saying something like “It’s a disgrace,” “It’s a perfect scandal,” “No other nation would put up with it,” and “Here we all are grumbling; and what are we going to do about it?  Nothing.  That’s the British way.”  They were not complaining of any act of injustice perpetrated against a prisoner.  They were complaining of their own treatment.  Fifty or sixty of them had been summoned from the four ends of the county, and kept packed away all day under a gallery at the back of the court, where there was not even room for all of them to sit down, and where there was certainly not room for all of them to breathe.  It would have been an easy thing for the Clerk of the Court to choose a dozen jurymen