I do not see any possible fault in the above figures.  I ought to say that I deferred putting a value on the potatoes until I had footed up the debit column.  This is always the safest way to do.  I had twenty-five bushels.  I roughly estimated that there are one hundred good ones to the bushel.  Making my own market price, I asked two cents apiece for them.  This I should have considered dirt cheap last June, when I was going down the rows with the hoe.  If any one thinks that two cents each is high, let him try to raise them.

Nature is “awful smart.”  I intend to be complimentary in saying so.  She shows it in little things.  I have mentioned my attempt to put in a few modest turnips, near the close of the season.  I sowed the seeds, by the way, in the most liberal manner.  Into three or four short rows I presume I put enough to sow an acre; and they all came up,—­came up as thick as grass, as crowded and useless as babies in a Chinese village.  Of course, they had to be thinned out; that is, pretty much all pulled up; and it took me a long time; for it takes a conscientious man some time to decide which are the best and healthiest plants to spare.  After all, I spared too many.  That is the great danger everywhere in this world (it may not be in the next):  things are too thick; we lose all in grasping for too much.  The Scotch say, that no man ought to thin out his own turnips, because he will not sacrifice enough to leave room for the remainder to grow:  he should get his neighbor, who does not care for the plants, to do it.  But this is mere talk, and aside from the point:  if there is anything I desire to avoid in these agricultural papers, it is digression.  I did think that putting in these turnips so late in the season, when general activity has ceased, and in a remote part of the garden, they would pass unnoticed.  But Nature never even winks, as I can see.  The tender blades were scarcely out of the ground when she sent a small black fly, which seemed to have been born and held in reserve for this purpose,—­to cut the leaves.  They speedily made lace-work of the whole bed.  Thus everything appears to have its special enemy,—­except, perhaps, p——­y:  nothing ever troubles that.

Did the Concord Grape ever come to more luscious perfection than this year? or yield so abundantly?  The golden sunshine has passed into them, and distended their purple skins almost to bursting.  Such heavy clusters! such bloom! such sweetness! such meat and drink in their round globes!  What a fine fellow Bacchus would have been, if he had only signed the pledge when he was a young man!  I have taken off clusters that were as compact and almost as large as the Black Hamburgs.  It is slow work picking them.  I do not see how the gatherers for the vintage ever get off enough.  It takes so long to disentangle the bunches from the leaves and the interlacing vines and the supporting tendrils; and then I like to hold up each bunch and look at it in the sunlight, and