I have been digging my potatoes, if anybody cares to know it.  I planted them in what are called “Early Rose,”—­the rows a little less than three feet apart; but the vines came to an early close in the drought.  Digging potatoes is a pleasant, soothing occupation, but not poetical.  It is good for the mind, unless they are too small (as many of mine are), when it begets a want of gratitude to the bountiful earth.  What small potatoes we all are, compared with what we might be!  We don’t plow deep enough, any of us, for one thing.  I shall put in the plow next year, and give the tubers room enough.  I think they felt the lack of it this year:  many of them seemed ashamed to come out so small.  There is great pleasure in turning out the brown-jacketed fellows into the sunshine of a royal September day, and seeing them glisten as they lie thickly strewn on the warm soil.  Life has few such moments.  But then they must be picked up.  The picking-up, in this world, is always the unpleasant part of it.

SIXTEENTH WEEK

I do not hold myself bound to answer the question, Does gardening pay?  It is so difficult to define what is meant by paying.  There is a popular notion that, unless a thing pays, you had better let it alone; and I may say that there is a public opinion that will not let a man or woman continue in the indulgence of a fancy that does not pay.  And public opinion is stronger than the legislature, and nearly as strong as the ten commandments:  I therefore yield to popular clamor when I discuss the profit of my garden.

As I look at it, you might as well ask, Does a sunset pay?  I know that a sunset is commonly looked on as a cheap entertainment; but it is really one of the most expensive.  It is true that we can all have front seats, and we do not exactly need to dress for it as we do for the opera; but the conditions under which it is to be enjoyed are rather dear.  Among them I should name a good suit of clothes, including some trifling ornament,—­not including back hair for one sex, or the parting of it in the middle for the other.  I should add also a good dinner, well cooked and digestible; and the cost of a fair education, extended, perhaps, through generations in which sensibility and love of beauty grew.  What I mean is, that if a man is hungry and naked, and half a savage, or with the love of beauty undeveloped in him, a sunset is thrown away on him:  so that it appears that the conditions of the enjoyment of a sunset are as costly as anything in our civilization.

Of course there is no such thing as absolute value in this world.  You can only estimate what a thing is worth to you.  Does gardening in a city pay?  You might as well ask if it pays to keep hens, or a trotting-horse, or to wear a gold ring, or to keep your lawn cut, or your hair cut.  It is as you like it.  In a certain sense, it is a sort of profanation to consider if my garden pays, or to set