There is a man I sometimes encounter on the street between whom and myself there looms a day of bitter reckoning.  He wears rubbers if the day is at all moist, and next to ear muffs, galoshes on an able bodied man goad me to fury.  If the Lord made you a man, be a man and not a molly-coddle.  Soup without meat, bread without salt, pie-crust without a filling, slack-baked dough, all these are prototypes of the man without endurance or sufficient stamina to stand getting his delicate feet dashed with dew, or his shell-like ears nipped by frost.

XXXVII.

A dream garden.

Country living is delightful, but, like all other blessings, it has its alternates of shadow.  I used to sit here by my window last April and gloat over the prospects for the vegetable garden a tramp laid out and seeded for me in the early spring.  What luscious peas were going to clamber over the trellis along about the middle of July!  What golden squashes were going to nestle in the little hollows!  What lusty corn was going to stride the hillocks!  What colonies of beans and beds of lettuce should fill the spaces, like stars in the wake of a triumphant moon, and how odorous the breath of the healthful onion should be upon the midsummer air!  But listen.  No Assyrian ever yet came down upon the fold as my neighbor’s chickens have descended upon the fair territory of my garden.  As for shooing a chicken off, my dear, when its gigantic intellect is set upon scratching up a seeded bed, you might as well attempt to wave back a thunderstorm with a fan.

I have undertaken several difficult things in my life, but never one so hopeless as convincing a calm and resolute hen that she is an intruder.  I spent one glad summer trying to keep a brood out of a geranium bed, and had typhoid fever all the fall just from overwork and worry.  But say there had been no chickens to “wear the heart and waste the body,” how about potato bugs, and caterpillars and huge and gruesome slugs?  I never go out to sprinkle the sad pea vines or pick the drooping lettuce but what I resolve myself into a magnet to lure the early vegetable-devouring reptile from its lair.  Large 7 by 9 caterpillars and zebra-striped ladybugs disport themselves on neck and ankle until I flee the scene.

XXXVIII.

Anything worse than A blue-jay?  Hardly!

If there is anything worse than a blue-jay, name it.  Perhaps a mannish woman, with a shrill voice and a waspish tongue, is as bad, but she can’t be worse.  There are something less than a hundred of these feathered hornets dwelling in the grove that surrounds my house, and they began before sunrise to call names and fight clamorous battles.  One of them starts the row by crying something in the ear of a neighbor, which sounds like a challenge blown