both for an encouragement and a warning. I shall give the history of the
several ventures separately, as nearly as I can recollect in the
order in which they grew, beginning with the humbler ministers to our
appetites, and soaring gradually into the region of the poetical and the
beautiful.

BEETS.--The beets came up, little red-veined leaves, struggling for
breath among a tangle of Roman wormwood and garlic; and though they
exhibited great tenacity of life, they also exhibited great irregularity
of purpose. In one spot there would be nothing, in an adjacent spot a
whorl of beets, big and little, crowding and jostling and elbowing each
other, like school-boys round the red-hot stove on a winter's morning.
I knew they had been planted in a right line, and I don't, even now,
comprehend why they should not come up in a right line. I weeded them,
and though freedom from foreign growth discovered an intention, of
straightness, the most casual observer could not but see that skewiness
had usurped its place. I repaired to my friend the gardener. He said
they must be thinned out and transplanted. It went to my heart to pull
up the dear things, but I did it, and set them down again tenderly in
the vacant spots. It was evening. The next morning I went to them.
Flatness has a new meaning to me since that morning. You can hardly
conceive that anything could look so utterly forlorn, disconsolate,
disheartened, and collapsed. In fact, they exhibited a degree of
depression so entirely beyond what the circumstances demanded, that I
was enraged. If they had shown any symptoms of trying to live, I could
have sighed and forgiven them; but, on the contrary, they had flopped
and died without a struggle, and I pulled them up without a pang,
comforting myself with the remaining ones, which throve on their
companions' graves, and waxed fat and full and crimson-hearted, in their
soft, brown beds. So delighted was I with their luxuriant rotundity,