I have pretty much come to the conclusion that you have got to put your foot down in gardening.  If I had actually taken counsel of my friends, I should not have had a thing growing in the garden to-day but weeds.  And besides, while you are waiting, Nature does not wait.  Her mind is made up.  She knows just what she will raise; and she has an infinite variety of early and late.  The most humiliating thing to me about a garden is the lesson it teaches of the inferiority of man.  Nature is prompt, decided, inexhaustible.  She thrusts up her plants with a vigor and freedom that I admire; and the more worthless the plant, the more rapid and splendid its growth.  She is at it early and late, and all night; never tiring, nor showing the least sign of exhaustion.

“Eternal gardening is the price of liberty,” is a motto that I should put over the gateway of my garden, if I had a gate.  And yet it is not wholly true; for there is no liberty in gardening.  The man who undertakes a garden is relentlessly pursued.  He felicitates himself that, when he gets it once planted, he will have a season of rest and of enjoyment in the sprouting and growing of his seeds.  It is a green anticipation.  He has planted a seed that will keep him awake nights; drive rest from his bones, and sleep from his pillow.  Hardly is the garden planted, when he must begin to hoe it.  The weeds have sprung up all over it in a night.  They shine and wave in redundant life.  The docks have almost gone to seed; and their roots go deeper than conscience.  Talk about the London Docks!—­the roots of these are like the sources of the Aryan race.  And the weeds are not all.  I awake in the morning (and a thriving garden will wake a person up two hours before he ought to be out of bed) and think of the tomato-plants,—­the leaves like fine lace-work, owing to black bugs that skip around, and can’t be caught.  Somebody ought to get up before the dew is off (why don’t the dew stay on till after a reasonable breakfast?) and sprinkle soot on the leaves.  I wonder if it is I. Soot is so much blacker than the bugs, that they are disgusted, and go away.  You can’t get up too early, if you have a garden.  You must be early due yourself, if you get ahead of the bugs.  I think, that, on the whole, it would be best to sit up all night, and sleep daytimes.  Things appear to go on in the night in the garden uncommonly.  It would be less trouble to stay up than it is to get up so early.

I have been setting out some new raspberries, two sorts,—­a silver and a gold color.  How fine they will look on the table next year in a cut-glass dish, the cream being in a ditto pitcher!  I set them four and five feet apart.  I set my strawberries pretty well apart also.  The reason is, to give room for the cows to run through when they break into the garden,—­as they do sometimes.  A cow needs a broader track than a locomotive; and she generally makes one.  I am sometimes astonished, to see how big a space in, a flower-bed her foot will cover.  The raspberries are called Doolittle and Golden Cap.  I don’t like the name of the first variety, and, if they do much, shall change it to Silver Top.  You never can tell what a thing named Doolittle will do.  The one in the Senate changed color, and got sour.  They ripen badly,—­either mildew, or rot on the bush.  They are apt to Johnsonize,—­rot on the stem.  I shall watch the Doolittles.