our living out of it.  Practically, the business is hardly to the taste of a person of a poetic turn of mind.  The details of fertilizing are not agreeable.  Michael Angelo, who tried every art, and nearly every trade, never gave his mind to fertilizing.  It is much pleasanter and easier to fertilize with a pen, as the agricultural writers do, than with a fork.  And this leads me to say, that, in carrying on a garden yourself, you must have a “consulting” gardener; that is, a man to do the heavy and unpleasant work.  To such a man, I say, in language used by Demosthenes to the Athenians, and which is my advice to all gardeners, “Fertilize, fertilize, fertilize!”

THIRTEENTH WEEK

I find that gardening has unsurpassed advantages for the study of natural history; and some scientific facts have come under my own observation, which cannot fail to interest naturalists and un-naturalists in about the same degree.  Much, for instance, has been written about the toad, an animal without which no garden would be complete.  But little account has been made of his value:  the beauty of his eye alone has been dwelt on; and little has been said of his mouth, and its important function as a fly and bug trap.  His habits, and even his origin, have been misunderstood.  Why, as an illustration, are toads so plenty after a thunder-shower?  All my life long, no one has been able to answer me that question.  Why, after a heavy shower, and in the midst of it, do such multitudes of toads, especially little ones, hop about on the gravel-walks?  For many years, I believed that they rained down; and I suppose many people think so still.  They are so small, and they come in such numbers only in the shower, that the supposition is not a violent one.  “Thick as toads after a shower,” is one of our best proverbs.  I asked an explanation ’of this of a thoughtful woman,—­indeed, a leader in the great movement to have all the toads hop in any direction, without any distinction of sex or religion.  Her reply was, that the toads come out during the shower to get water.  This, however, is not the fact.  I have discovered that they come out not to get water.  I deluged a dry flower-bed, the other night, with pailful after pailful of water.  Instantly the toads came out of their holes in the dirt, by tens and twenties and fifties, to escape death by drowning.  The big ones fled away in a ridiculous streak of hopping; and the little ones sprang about in the wildest confusion.  The toad is just like any other land animal:  when his house is full of water, he quits it.  These facts, with the drawings of the water and the toads, are at the service of the distinguished scientists of Albany in New York, who were so much impressed by the Cardiff Giant.