“What are you doing?”

“Nothing,” I answered, with that well-known accent which says, “Everything! and I mean to keep doing it.”

I have observed, that, in managing parents, husbands, lovers, brothers, and indeed all classes of inferiors, nothing is so efficacious as to let them know at the outset that you are going to have your own way.  They may fret a little at first, and interpose a few puny obstacles, but it will be only a temporary obstruction; whereas, if you parley and hesitate and suggest, they will but gather courage and strength for a formidable resistance.  It is the first step that costs.  Halicarnassus understood at once from my one small shot that I was in a mood to be let alone, and he let me alone accordingly.

I remembered he had said that the soil was not mellow enough, and I determined that my soil should be mellow, to which end I took it up by handfuls and squeezed it through my fingers, completely pulverizing it.  It was not disagreeable work.  Things in their right places are very seldom disagreeable.  A spider on your dress is a horror, but a spider outdoors is rather interesting.  Besides, the loam had a fine, soft feel that was absolutely pleasant; but a hideous black and yellow reptile with horns and hoofs, that winked up at me from it, was decidedly unpleasant and out of place, and I at once concluded that the soil was sufficiently mellow for my purposes, and smoothed it off directly.  Then, with delighted fingers, in sweeping circles, and fantastic whirls, and exact triangles, I planted my seeds in generous profusion, determined, that, if my wilderness did not blossom, it should not be from niggardliness of seed.  But even then my box was full before my basket was emptied, and I was very reluctantly compelled to bring down from the garret another box, which had been the property of my great-grandfather.  My great-grandfather was, I regret to say, a barber.  I would rather never have had any.  If there is anything in the world besides worth that I reverence, it is ancestry.  My whole life long have I been in search of a pedigree, and though I ran well at the beginning, I invariably stop short at the third remove by running my head into a barber’s shop.  If he had only been a farmer, now, I should not have minded.  There is something dignified and antique in land, and no one need trouble himself to ascertain whether “farmer” stood for a close-fisted, narrow-souled clodhopper, or the smiling, benevolent master of broad acres.  Farmer means both these, I could have chosen the meaning I liked, and it is not probable that any troublesome facts would have floated down the years to intercept any theory I might have launched.  I would rather he had been a shoemaker; it would have been so easy to transform him, after his lamented decease, into a shoe-manufacturer,—­and shoe-manufacturers, we all know, are highly respectable people, often become great men, and get sent to Congress.  An apothecary might have figured as an M.D.  A