Remark.—­This moral vegetable figure is at the service of any clergyman who will have the manliness to come forward and help me at a day’s hoeing on my potatoes.  None but the orthodox need apply.

I, however, believe in the intellectual, if not the moral, qualities of vegetables, and especially weeds.  There was a worthless vine that (or who) started up about midway between a grape-trellis and a row of bean-poles, some three feet from each, but a little nearer the trellis.  When it came out of the ground, it looked around to see what it should do.  The trellis was already occupied.  The bean-pole was empty.  There was evidently the a little best chance of light, air, and sole proprietorship on the pole.  And the vine started for the pole, and began to climb it with determination.  Here was as distinct an act of choice, of reason, as a boy exercises when he goes into a forest, and, looking about, decides which tree he will climb.  And, besides, how did the vine know enough to travel in exactly the right direction, three feet, to find what it wanted?  This is intellect.  The weeds, on the other hand, have hateful moral qualities.  To cut down a weed is, therefore, to do a moral action.  I feel as if I were destroying a sin.  My hoe becomes an instrument of retributive justice.  I am an apostle of nature.  This view of the matter lends a dignity to the art of hoeing which nothing else does, and lifts it into the region of ethics.  Hoeing becomes, not a pastime, but a duty.  And you get to regard it so, as the days and the weeds lengthen.

Observation.—­Nevertheless, what a man needs in gardening is a cast-iron back, with a hinge in it.  The hoe is an ingenious instrument, calculated to call out a great deal of strength at a great disadvantage.

The striped bug has come, the saddest of the year.  He is a moral double-ender, iron-clad at that.  He is unpleasant in two ways.  He burrows in the ground so that you cannot find him, and he flies away so that you cannot catch him.  He is rather handsome, as bugs go, but utterly dastardly, in that he gnaws the stem of the plant close to the ground, and ruins it without any apparent advantage to himself.  I find him on the hills of cucumbers (perhaps it will be a cholera-year, and we shall not want any), the squashes (small loss), and the melons (which never ripen).  The best way to deal with the striped bug is to sit down by the hills, and patiently watch for him.  If you are spry, you can annoy him.  This, however, takes time.  It takes all day and part of the night.  For he flieth in the darkness, and wasteth at noonday.  If you get up before the dew is off the plants,—­it goes off very early,—­you can sprinkle soot on the plant (soot is my panacea:  if I can get the disease of a plant reduced to the necessity of soot, I am all right); and soot is unpleasant to the bug.  But the best thing to do is set a toad to catch the bugs.  The toad at once establishes the most intimate relations