|I ALWAYS enjoy a vegetable garden, and through the winter I look
forward to the spring days when I will take my cob pipe and hoe and
go joyously afield. I like to toy with the moist earth and the common
squash bug of the work-a-day world. It is a pleasure also to irrigate
the garden, watering the sauer kraut plant and the timid tomato vine as
though they were children asking for a drink. I am never happier than
when I am engaged in irrigating my tropical garden or climbing my
neighbor with a hoe when he shuts off my water supply by sticking an old
pair of pantaloons in the canal that leads to my squash conservatory.
One day a man shut off my irrigation that way and dammed the water up
to such a degree that I shut off his air supply, and I was about to say
dammed him up also. We had quite a scuffle. Up to that time we had never
exchanged a harsh word. That morning I noticed that my early climbing
horse-radish and my dwarf army worms were looking a little au revoir,
and I wondered what was the matter. I had been absent several days and
was grieved to notice that my garden had a kind of blase air, as though
it needed rest and change of scene.
The Poland China egg-plant looked up sadly at me and seemed to say:
"Pardner, don't you think it's a long time between drinks?" The
watermelon seemed to have a dark brown taste in its mouth, and there was
an air of gloom all over the garden.
At that moment I discovered my next-door neighbor at the ditch on the
corner. He was singing softly to himself:
O, yes, I'll meet you;
I'll meet you when the sun goes down.
He was also jamming an old pair of Rembrandt pants into the canal, where
they would shut off my supply. He stood with his back towards me, and
just as he said he would "meet me when the sun went down," I smote him
across the back of the neck with my hoe handle, and before he could
recover from the first dumb surprise and wonder, I pulled the dripping
pantaloons out of the ditch and tied them in a true-lover's knot around
his neck. He began to look black in the face, and his struggles soon
ceased altogether. At that moment his wife came out and shrieked
two pure womanly shrieks, and hissed in my ear: "You have killed me
husband!"
I said, possibly I had. If so, would she please send in the bill and
I would adjust it at an early day. I said this in a bantering tone of
voice, and raising my hat to her in that polished way of mine, started
to go, when something fell with a thud on the greensward!
It was the author of these lines. I did not know till two days afterward
that my neighbor's wife wore a moire antique rolling-pin under her apron
that morning. I did not suspect it till it was too late. The affair was
kind of hushed up on account of the respectability of the parties.
By the time I had recovered the garden seemed to melt away into thin
air. My neighbor had it all his own way, and while his proud hollyhocks
and Johnny-jump-ups reared their heads to drink the mountain water at
the twilight hour, my little, low-necked, summer squashes curled up and
died.
Most every year yet I made a garden. I pay a man $3 to plow it. Then I
pay $7.50 for garden seeds and in July I hire the same man at $3 to
summer-fallow the whole thing while I go and buy my vegetables of a
Chinaman named Wun Lung. I've done this now for eight years, and I owe
my robust health and rich olive complexion to the fact that I've got a
garden and do just as little in it as possible. Parties desiring a dozen
or more of my Shanghai egg-plants to set under an ordinary domestic hen
can procure the same by writing to me and enclosing lock of hair and
$10.