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is the product of my own labor, except the clams, which I have not been able to raise yet, and the chickens, which have withdrawn from the garden just when they were most attractive.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!