have some charitable object,—­something that appeals to a vast sense of something; something that it will be right to get up lotteries and that sort of thing for.  I suggest a festival for the benefit of my garden; and this seems feasible.  In order to make everything pass off pleasantly, invited guests will bring or send their own strawberries and cream, which I shall be happy to sell to them at a slight advance.  There are a great many improvements which the garden needs; among them a sounding-board, so that the neighbors’ children can hear when I tell them to get a little farther off from the currant-bushes.  I should also like a selection from the ten commandments, in big letters, posted up conspicuously, and a few traps, that will detain, but not maim, for the benefit of those who cannot read.  But what is most important is, that the ladies should crochet nets to cover over the strawberries.  A good-sized, well-managed festival ought to produce nets enough to cover my entire beds; and I can think of no other method of preserving the berries from the birds next year.  I wonder how many strawberries it would need for a festival and whether they would cost more than the nets.

I am more and more impressed, as the summer goes on, with the inequality of man’s fight with Nature; especially in a civilized state.  In savagery, it does not much matter; for one does not take a square hold, and put out his strength, but rather accommodates himself to the situation, and takes what he can get, without raising any dust, or putting himself into everlasting opposition.  But the minute he begins to clear a spot larger than he needs to sleep in for a night, and to try to have his own way in the least, Nature is at once up, and vigilant, and contests him at every step with all her ingenuity and unwearied vigor.  This talk of subduing Nature is pretty much nonsense.  I do not intend to surrender in the midst of the summer campaign, yet I cannot but think how much more peaceful my relations would now be with the primal forces, if I had, let Nature make the garden according to her own notion. (This is written with the thermometer at ninety degrees, and the weeds starting up with a freshness and vigor, as if they had just thought of it for the first time, and had not been cut down and dragged out every other day since the snow went off.)

We have got down the forests, and exterminated savage beasts; but Nature is no more subdued than before:  she only changes her tactics, —­uses smaller guns, so to speak.  She reenforces herself with a variety of bugs, worms, and vermin, and weeds, unknown to the savage state, in order to make war upon the things of our planting; and calls in the fowls of the air, just as we think the battle is won, to snatch away the booty.  When one gets almost weary of the struggle, she is as fresh as at the beginning,—­just, in fact, ready for the fray.  I, for my part, begin to appreciate the value of frost and snow; for they give the husbandman a little peace, and enable him, for a season, to contemplate his incessant foe subdued.  I do not wonder that the tropical people, where Nature never goes to sleep, give it up, and sit in lazy acquiescence.