Nineteenth Week

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_ The closing scenes are not necessarily funereal. A garden should be got ready for winter as well as for summer. When one goes into winter-quarters, he wants everything neat and trim. Expecting high winds, we bring everything into close reef. Some men there are who never shave (if they are so absurd as ever to shave), except when they go abroad, and who do not take care to wear polished boots in the bosoms of their families. I like a man who shaves (next to one who does n't shave) to satisfy his own conscience, and not for display, and who dresses as neatly at home as he does anywhere. Such a man will be likely to put his garden in complete order before the snow comes, so that its last days shall not present a scene of melancholy ruin and decay.

I confess that, after such an exhausting campaign, I felt a great temptation to retire, and call it a drawn engagement. But better counsels prevailed. I determined that the weeds should not sleep on the field of battle. I routed them out, and leveled their works. I am master of the situation. If I have made a desert, I at least have peace; but it is not quite a desert. The strawberries, the raspberries, the celery, the turnips, wave green above the clean earth, with no enemy in sight. In these golden October days no work is more fascinating than this getting ready for spring. The sun is no longer a burning enemy, but a friend, illuminating all the open space, and warming the mellow soil. And the pruning and clearing away of rubbish, and the fertilizing, go on with something of the hilarity of a wake, rather than the despondency of other funerals. When the wind begins to come out of the northwest of set purpose, and to sweep the ground with low and searching fierceness, very different from the roistering, jolly bluster of early fall, I have put the strawberries under their coverlet of leaves, pruned the grape-vines and laid them under the soil, tied up the tender plants, given the fruit trees a good, solid meal about the roots; and so I turn away, writing Resurgam on the gatepost. And Calvin, aware that the summer is past and the harvest is ended, and that a mouse in the kitchen is worth two birds gone south, scampers away to the house with his tail in the air.

And yet I am not perfectly at rest in my mind. I know that this is only a truce until the parties recover their exhausted energies. All winter long the forces of chemistry will be mustering under ground, repairing the losses, calling up the reserves, getting new strength from my surface-fertilizing bounty, and making ready for the spring campaign. They will open it before I am ready: while the snow is scarcely melted, and the ground is not passable, they will begin to move on my works; and the fight will commence. Yet how deceitfully it will open to the music of birds and the soft enchantment of the spring mornings! I shall even be permitted to win a few skirmishes: the secret forces will even wait for me to plant and sow, and show my full hand, before they come on in heavy and determined assault. There are already signs of an internecine fight with the devil-grass, which has intrenched itself in a considerable portion of my garden-patch. It contests the ground inch by inch; and digging it out is very much such labor as eating a piece of choke-cherry pie with the stones all in. It is work, too, that I know by experience I shall have to do alone. Every man must eradicate his own devil-grass. The neighbors who have leisure to help you in grape-picking time are all busy when devil-grass is most aggressive. My neighbors' visits are well timed: it is only their hens which have seasons for their own.

I am told that abundant and rank weeds are signs of a rich soil; but I have noticed that a thin, poor soil grows little but weeds. I am inclined to think that the substratum is the same, and that the only choice in this world is what kind of weeds you will have. I am not much attracted by the gaunt, flavorless mullein, and the wiry thistle of upland country pastures, where the grass is always gray, as if the world were already weary and sick of life. The awkward, uncouth wickedness of remote country-places, where culture has died out after the first crop, is about as disagreeable as the ranker and richer vice of city life, forced by artificial heat and the juices of an overfed civilization. There is no doubt that, on the whole, the rich soil is the best: the fruit of it has body and flavor. To what affluence does a woman (to take an instance, thank Heaven, which is common) grow, with favoring circumstances, under the stimulus of the richest social and intellectual influences! I am aware that there has been a good deal said in poetry about the fringed gentian and the harebell of rocky districts and waysides, and I know that it is possible for maidens to bloom in very slight soil into a wild-wood grace and beauty; yet, the world through, they lack that wealth of charms, that tropic affluence of both person and mind, which higher and more stimulating culture brings,--the passion as well as the soul glowing in the Cloth-of-Gold rose. Neither persons nor plants are ever fully themselves until they are cultivated to their highest. I, for one, have no fear that society will be too much enriched. The only question is about keeping down the weeds; and I have learned by experience, that we need new sorts of hoes, and more disposition to use them.

Moral Deduction.--The difference between soil and society is evident. We bury decay in the earth; we plant in it the perishing; we feed it with offensive refuse: but nothing grows out of it that is not clean; it gives us back life and beauty for our rubbish. Society returns us what we give it.

Pretending to reflect upon these things, but in reality watching the blue-jays, who are pecking at the purple berries of the woodbine on the south gable, I approach the house. Polly is picking up chestnuts on the sward, regardless of the high wind which rattles them about her head and upon the glass roof of her winter-garden. The garden, I see, is filled with thrifty plants, which will make it always summer there. The callas about the fountain will be in flower by Christmas: the plant appears to keep that holiday in her secret heart all summer. I close the outer windows as we go along, and congratulate myself that we are ready for winter. For the winter-garden I have no responsibility: Polly has entire charge of it. I am only required to keep it heated, and not too hot either; to smoke it often for the death of the bugs; to water it once a day; to move this and that into the sun and out of the sun pretty constantly: but she does all the work. We never relinquish that theory.

As we pass around the house, I discover a boy in the ravine filling a bag with chestnuts and hickorynuts. They are not plenty this year; and I suggest the propriety of leaving some for us. The boy is a little slow to take the idea: but he has apparently found the picking poor, and exhausted it; for, as he turns away down the glen, he hails me with,

"Mister, I say, can you tell me where I can find some walnuts?"

The coolness of this world grows upon me. It is time to go in and light a wood-fire on the hearth. _

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