May I ask you now, O Friend, who, I would fain believe, have followed me thus far with no hostile eyes, to glide in tranced forgetfulness through the white blooms of May and the roses of June, into the warm breath of July afternoons and the languid pulse of August, perhaps even into the mild haze of September and the “flying gold” of brown October?  In narrating to you the fruition of my hopes, I shall endeavor to preserve that calm equanimity which is the birthright of royal minds.  I shall endeavor not to be unduly elated by success nor unduly depressed by failure, but to state in simple language the result of my experiments, both for an encouragement and a warning.  I shall give the history of the several ventures separately, as nearly as I can recollect in the order in which they grew, beginning with the humbler ministers to our appetites, and soaring gradually into the region of the poetical and the beautiful.

BEETS.—­The beets came up, little red-veined leaves, struggling for breath among a tangle of Roman wormwood and garlic; and though they exhibited great tenacity of life, they also exhibited great irregularity of purpose.  In one spot there would be nothing, in an adjacent spot a whorl of beets, big and little, crowding and jostling and elbowing each other, like school-boys round the red-hot stove on a winter’s morning.  I knew they had been planted in a right line, and I don’t, even now, comprehend why they should not come up in a right line.  I weeded them, and though freedom from foreign growth discovered an intention, of straightness, the most casual observer could not but see that skewiness had usurped its place.  I repaired to my friend the gardener.  He said they must be thinned out and transplanted.  It went to my heart to pull up the dear things, but I did it, and set them down again tenderly in the vacant spots.  It was evening.  The next morning I went to them.  Flatness has a new meaning to me since that morning.  You can hardly conceive that anything could look so utterly forlorn, disconsolate, disheartened, and collapsed.  In fact, they exhibited a degree of depression so entirely beyond what the circumstances demanded, that I was enraged.  If they had shown any symptoms of trying to live, I could have sighed and forgiven them; but, on the contrary, they had flopped and died without a struggle, and I pulled them up without a pang, comforting myself with the remaining ones, which throve on their companions’ graves, and waxed fat and full and crimson-hearted, in their soft, brown beds.  So delighted was I with their luxuriant rotundity, that I made an internal resolve that henceforth I would always plant beets.  True, I cannot abide beets.  Their fragrance and their flavor are alike nauseating; but they come up, and a beet that will come up is better than a cedar of Lebanon that won’t.  In all the vegetable kingdom I know of no quality better than this, growth,—­nor any quality that will atone for its absence.