Talk about the Darwinian theory of development, and the principle of natural selection!  I should like to see a garden let to run in accordance with it.  If I had left my vegetables and weeds to a free fight, in which the strongest specimens only should come to maturity, and the weaker go to the wall, I can clearly see that I should have had a pretty mess of it.  It would have been a scene of passion and license and brutality.  The “pusley” would have strangled the strawberry; the upright corn, which has now ears to hear the guilty beating of the hearts of the children who steal the raspberries, would have been dragged to the earth by the wandering bean; the snake-grass would have left no place for the potatoes under ground; and the tomatoes would have been swamped by the lusty weeds.  With a firm hand, I have had to make my own “natural selection.”  Nothing will so well bear watching as a garden, except a family of children next door.  Their power of selection beats mine.  If they could read half as well as they can steal awhile away, I should put up a notice, “Children, beware!  There is Protoplasm here.”  But I suppose it would have no effect.  I believe they would eat protoplasm as quick as anything else, ripe or green.  I wonder if this is going to be a cholera-year.  Considerable cholera is the only thing that would let my apples and pears ripen.  Of course I do not care for the fruit; but I do not want to take the responsibility of letting so much “life-matter,” full of crude and even wicked vegetable-human tendencies, pass into the composition of the neighbors’ children, some of whom may be as immortal as snake-grass.  There ought to be a public meeting about this, and resolutions, and perhaps a clambake.  At least, it ought to be put into the catechism, and put in strong.

TENTH WEEK

I think I have discovered the way to keep peas from the birds.  I tried the scarecrow plan, in a way which I thought would outwit the shrewdest bird.  The brain of the bird is not large; but it is all concentrated on one object, and that is the attempt to elude the devices of modern civilization which injure his chances of food.  I knew that, if I put up a complete stuffed man, the bird would detect the imitation at once:  the perfection of the thing would show him that it was a trick.  People always overdo the matter when they attempt deception.  I therefore hung some loose garments, of a bright color, upon a rake-head, and set them up among the vines.  The supposition was, that the bird would think there was an effort to trap him, that there was a man behind, holding up these garments, and would sing, as he kept at a distance, “You can’t catch me with any such double device.”  The bird would know, or think he knew, that I would not hang up such a scare, in the expectation that it would pass for a man, and deceive a bird; and he would therefore look for a deeper plot.  I expected to outwit the bird by a duplicity that was simplicity itself I may have over-calculated the sagacity and reasoning power of the bird.  At any rate, I did over-calculate the amount of peas I should gather.