“No matter whether he likes it or not,” codiciled Conscience.  “You do it.”

“I—­don’t exactly like—­to—­take the responsibility,” wavered this modern Faint-Heart.

“I don’t want you to take the responsibility,” I ejaculated, with volcanic vehemence.  “I’ll take the responsibility.  You take the hoe.”

These duty-people do infuriate me.  They are so afraid to do anything that isn’t laid out in a right-angled triangle.  Every path must be graded and turfed before they dare set their scrupulous feet in it.  I like conscience, but, like corn and potatoes, carried too far, it becomes a vice.  I think I could commit a murder with less hesitation than some people buy a ninepenny calico.  And to see that man stand there, balancing probabilities over a piece of ground no bigger than a bed-quilt, as if a nation’s fate were at stake, was enough to ruffle a calmer temper than mine.  My impetuosity impressed him, however, and he began to lay about him vigorously with hoe and rake and lines, and, in an incredibly short space of time, had a bit of square flatness laid out with wonderful precision.  Meanwhile I had ransacked my vegetable-bag, and though lettuce and asparagus were not there, plenty of beets and parsnips and squashes, etc., were.  I let him take his choice.  He took the first two.  The rest were left on my hands.  But I had gone too far to recede.  They burned in my pocket for a few days, and I saw that I must get them into the ground somewhere.  I could not sleep with them in the room.  They were wandering shades craving at my hands a burial, and I determined to put them where Banquo’s ghost would not go,—­down.  Down accordingly they went, but not symmetrically nor simultaneously.  I faced Halicarnassus on the subject of the beet-bed, and though I cannot say that either of us gained a brilliant victory, yet I can say that I kept possession of the ground; still, I did not care to risk a second encounter.  So I kept my seeds about me continually, and dropped them surreptitiously as occasion offered.  Consequently, my garden, taken as a whole, was located where the Penobscot Indian was born,—­“all along shore.”  The squashes were scattered among the corn.  The beans were tucked under the brushwood, in the fond hope that they would climb up it.  Two tomato-plants were lodged in the potato-field, under the protection of some broken apple-branches dragged thither for the purpose.  The cucumbers went down on the sheltered side of a wood-pile.  The peas took their chances of life under the sink-nose.  The sweet-corn was marked off from the rest by a broomstick,—­and all took root alike in my heart.