Bent on making it go merrily as long as I shall live, the following day I called out to her at the window: 

“Georgiana, I’m improving.  I’m getting along.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Well, in town this morning they chose me as one of the judges of vegetables at the fair next month.  I said, ’Gentlemen, I expect to be married before that time, and I do not intend to be separated from my wife.  Will she have the privilege of accompanying me among these competing vegetables?  And last month they made me director of a turnpike company—­I suppose because it runs through my farm.  To-day at a meeting of the directors I said, ’Gentlemen, how far is this turnpike to run?  I will direct it to the end of my farm and not a step farther.  I do not wish to be separated from my wife.’”

Georgiana has teased me a good deal in my life.  It is well to let a woman taste of the tree of knowledge whose fruit she is fond of dispensing.

“You’d better be careful!” she said, archly.

“Remember, I haven’t married you yet.”

“I am careful,” I replied.  “I haven’t married you yet, cither!  My idea, Georgiana,” I continued, “is to plant a grove and raise cocoons.  That would gratify my love of nature and your fancy for silk dresses.  I could have my silk woven and spun in our manufactory at Newport, Kentucky; and you know that we couldn’t possibly lose each other among the mulberry-trees.”

“You’d better take care!” she repeated.  “Do you expect to talk to me in this style after we are married?”

“That will all depend upon how you talk to me,” I answered.  “But I have always understood married life to be the season when the worm begins to turn.”

Despite my levity, I have been secretly stricken with remorse at the monstrous selfishness that lay coiled like a canker in my words.  I was really no better than those men who say to their wives: 

“While I was trying to win you, the work of my life was secondary—­you were everything.  Now that I have won you, it will be everything, and you must not stand in the way.”

But the thought is insupportable that Georgiana should not be happy with me at any cost.  I divine now the reason of the effort she has long been making to win me from nature; therefore of my own free will I have privately set about changing the character of my life with the idea of suiting it to some other work in which she too may be content.  And thus it has come about that during the August now ended—­always the month of the year in which my nature will go its solitary way and seek its woodland peace—­I have hung about the town as one who is offered for hire to a master whom he has never seen and for a work that he hates to do.  Many of the affairs that engage the passions of my fellow-beings are to me as the gray stubble through which I walk in the September fields—­the rotting wastage of harvests long