There is a congregation of the blackest of all insects hiding in horrid congestion among the leaves and flowers at the top.  Compared to them, the green-fly on the roses has almost charm.  There is something slummy and unwashed-looking about the black blight.  These insects are as foul as a stagnant pond.  Though they have wings, they seem incapable of flight.  They are microbes of a larger growth—­a disease and a desecration.  On the other hand, there is one good point about them:  they are very stupid.  Instead of spreading themselves out along the entire extent of the bean and so lessening their peril, they mass themselves in hordes in the very tops of the plants as though they had all some passionate taste for rocking in the wind like the baby on the tree-top.  This is what gives the gardener his opportunity.  He has but to walk along the rows, pinching off the top of each plant, and filling his flat little basket (called, I believe, a trug) with them, and lo, the beans are safe, and produce all the finer and fuller pods as a result of their having been stunted.

At this point the moral thrusts out its head.  There are those who believe that beans have no morals.  To call a man “Old bean” gives him, it is said, a pleasant feeling that he is something of a dog.  Gilbert, again, in Patience has a reference to “a not-too-French French bean” that suggests a ribald estimate of this family of plants.  The broad bean, on the other hand, seems to me to exude morality—­not least, when it parts with its head to save its life.  There is no better preacher in the vegetable garden.  It is the very Chrysostom of the gospel of frustration—­the gospel that a great loss may be a great gain—­the gospel that through their repressions men may all the more successfully achieve their ends.

Nor is this gospel confined to the sect of the beans (which are by a happy paradox both broad and evangelical).  The apple-trees bear the same message in their unpruned branches—­unpruned owing to a long absence from home during the winter.  It is an amazing fact—­I speak as an amateur—­but it is an amazing fact, if it is a fact, that an apple-tree, if it is left to itself, will not grow apples.  It has an entirely selfish purpose in life.  Its aim is to be a tree, living to itself, producing a multitude of shoots and leaves.  It succeeds in living a rich and fruitful life only when the gardener has come with the abhorred shears and lopped its branches till it must feel like a frustrate thing.  The fruit is the fruit of frustration.  Were it not for this frustration, it would ultimately return to a state of wildness, and would become a crabbed and barren weed, fit only to be a perch for birds.