inherited a love of the garden, but a feminine garden, the garden
_parvus, minor, minimus_--so many cut-worms long, so many cut-worms
wide. I love a garden of size, a garden that one cut-worm cannot sweep
down upon in the night.

For years I have wanted to be a farmer, but there in the furrow ahead
of me, like a bird on its nest, she has sat with her knitting; and when
I speak of loving long rows to hoe, she smiles and says, "For the
_boys_ to hoe." Her unit of garden measure is a meal--so many beet
seeds for a meal; so many meals for a row, with never two rows of
anything, with hardly a full-length row of anything, and with all the
rows of different lengths, as if gardening were a sort of geometry or a
problem in arithmetic, figuring your vegetable with the meal for a
common divisor--how many times it will go into all your rows without
leaving a remainder!

Now I go by the seed catalogue, planting, not after the dish, as if my
only vision were a garden peeled and in the pot, but after the Bush.,
Peck, Qt., Pt., Lb., Oz., Pkg.,--so many pounds to the acre, instead of
so many seeds to the meal.

And I have tried to show her that gardening is something of a risk,
attended by chance, and no such exact science as dressmaking; that you
cannot sow seeds as you can sew buttons; that the seed-man has no
machine for putting sure-sprout-humps into each of his minute wares as
the hook-and-eye-man has; that with all wisdom and understanding one
could do no better than to buy (as I am careful to do) out of that
catalogue whose title reads "Honest Seeds"; and that even the Sower in
Holy Writ allowed somewhat for stony places and other inherent hazards
of planting time.