The closing scenes are not necessarily funereal.  A garden should be got ready for winter as well as for summer.  When one goes into winter-quarters, he wants everything neat and trim.  Expecting high winds, we bring everything into close reef.  Some men there are who never shave (if they are so absurd as ever to shave), except when they go abroad, and who do not take care to wear polished boots in the bosoms of their families.  I like a man who shaves (next to one who does n’t shave) to satisfy his own conscience, and not for display, and who dresses as neatly at home as he does anywhere.  Such a man will be likely to put his garden in complete order before the snow comes, so that its last days shall not present a scene of melancholy ruin and decay.

I confess that, after such an exhausting campaign, I felt a great temptation to retire, and call it a drawn engagement.  But better counsels prevailed.  I determined that the weeds should not sleep on the field of battle.  I routed them out, and leveled their works.  I am master of the situation.  If I have made a desert, I at least have peace; but it is not quite a desert.  The strawberries, the raspberries, the celery, the turnips, wave green above the clean earth, with no enemy in sight.  In these golden October days no work is more fascinating than this getting ready for spring.  The sun is no longer a burning enemy, but a friend, illuminating all the open space, and warming the mellow soil.  And the pruning and clearing away of rubbish, and the fertilizing, go on with something of the hilarity of a wake, rather than the despondency of other funerals.  When the wind begins to come out of the northwest of set purpose, and to sweep the ground with low and searching fierceness, very different from the roistering, jolly bluster of early fall, I have put the strawberries under their coverlet of leaves, pruned the grape-vines and laid them under the soil, tied up the tender plants, given the fruit trees a good, solid meal about the roots; and so I turn away, writing Resurgam on the gatepost.  And Calvin, aware that the summer is past and the harvest is ended, and that a mouse in the kitchen is worth two birds gone south, scampers away to the house with his tail in the air.

And yet I am not perfectly at rest in my mind.  I know that this is only a truce until the parties recover their exhausted energies.  All winter long the forces of chemistry will be mustering under ground, repairing the losses, calling up the reserves, getting new strength from my surface-fertilizing bounty, and making ready for the spring campaign.  They will open it before I am ready:  while the snow is scarcely melted, and the ground is not passable, they will begin to move on my works; and the fight will commence.  Yet how deceitfully it will open to the music of birds and the soft enchantment of the spring mornings!  I shall even be permitted to win a few skirmishes:  the secret forces will even wait for me to plant and sow, and show my full