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