第31章

I like to go into the garden these warm latter days, and muse.To muse is to sit in the sun, and not think of anything.I am not sure but goodness comes out of people who bask in the sun, as it does out of a sweet apple roasted before the fire.The late September and October sun of this latitude is something like the sun of extreme Lower Italy: you can stand a good deal of it, and apparently soak a winter supply into the system.If one only could take in his winter fuel in this way! The next great discovery will, very likely, be the conservation of sunlight.In the correlation of forces, I look to see the day when the superfluous sunshine will be utilized; as, for instance, that which has burned up my celery this year will be converted into a force to work the garden.

This sitting in the sun amid the evidences of a ripe year is the easiest part of gardening I have experienced.But what a combat has gone on here! What vegetable passions have run the whole gamut of ambition, selfishness, greed of place, fruition, satiety, and now rest here in the truce of exhaustion! What a battle-field, if one may look upon it so! The corn has lost its ammunition, and stacked arms in a slovenly, militia sort of style.The ground vines are torn, trampled, and withered; and the ungathered cucumbers, worthless melons, and golden squashes lie about like the spent bombs and exploded shells of a battle-field.So the cannon-balls lay on the sandy plain before Fort Fisher after the capture.So the great grassy meadow at Munich, any morning during the October Fest, is strewn with empty beermugs.History constantly repeats itself.

There is a large crop of moral reflections in my garden, which anybody is at liberty to gather who passes this way.

I have tried to get in anything that offered temptation to sin.

There would be no thieves if there was nothing to steal; and Isuppose, in the thieves' catechism, the provider is as bad as the thief; and, probably, I am to blame for leaving out a few winter pears, which some predatory boy carried off on Sunday.At first Iwas angry, and said I should like to have caught the urchin in the act; but, on second thought, I was glad I did not.The interview could not have been pleasant: I shouldn't have known what to do with him.The chances are, that he would have escaped away with his pockets full, and jibed at me from a safe distance.And, if I had got my hands on him, I should have been still more embarrassed.If Ihad flogged him, he would have got over it a good deal sooner than Ishould.That sort of boy does not mind castigation any more than he does tearing his trousers in the briers.If I had treated him with kindness, and conciliated him with grapes, showing him the enormity of his offense, I suppose he would have come the next night, and taken the remainder of the grapes.The truth is, that the public morality is lax on the subject of fruit.If anybody puts arsenic or gunpowder into his watermelons, he is universally denounced as a stingy old murderer by the community.A great many people regard growing fruit as lawful prey, who would not think of breaking into your cellar to take it.I found a man once in my raspberry-bushes, early in the season, when we were waiting for a dishful to ripen.

Upon inquiring what he was about, he said he was only eating some;and the operation seemed to be so natural and simple, that I disliked to disturb him.And I am not very sure that one has a right to the whole of an abundant crop of fruit until he has gathered it.At least, in a city garden, one might as well conform his theory to the practice of the community.