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.