r a second in the air. "Like
that," he said.

I thought the explanation sufficient, but he paused for a moment after
giving it. "As in a flock bed, you know," he added and resumed his
discourse.

3

My father, I am afraid, carried a natural incompetence in practical
affairs to an exceptionally high level. He combined practical
incompetence, practical enterprise and a thoroughly sanguine
temperament, in a manner that I have never seen paralleled in any human
being. He was always trying to do new things in the briskest manner,
under the suggestion of books or papers or his own spontaneous
imagination, and as he had never been trained to do anything whatever
in his life properly, his futilities were extensive and thorough. At one
time he nearly gave up his classes for intensive culture, so enamoured
was he of its possibilities; the peculiar pungency of the manure he got,
in pursuit of a chemical theory of his own, has scarred my olfactory
memories for a lifetime. The intensive culture phase is very clear in my
memory; it came near the end of his career and when I was between eleven
and twelve. I was mobilised to gather caterpillars on several occasions,
and assisted in nocturnal raids upon the slugs by lantern-light that
wrecked my preparation work for school next day. My father dug up both
lawns, and trenched and manured in spasms of immense vigour alternating
with periods of paralysing distaste for the garden. And for weeks he
talked about eight hundred pounds an acre at every meal.

A garden, even when it is not exasperated by intensive methods, is a
thing as exacting as a baby, its moods have to be watched; it does
not wait upon the cultivator's convenience, but has times of its own.
Intensive culture greatly increases this disposition to trouble mankind;
it makes a garden touchy and hysterical, a drugged and demoralised and
over-irritated garden. My father got at cross purposes with our two
patches at an early stage. Everything grew wrong from the first to last,
and if my father's manures intensified nothing else, they certainly
intensified the Primordial Curse. The peas were eaten in the night
before they were three inches high, the beans bore nothing but blight,
the only apparent result of a spraying of the potatoes was to develop
a PENCHANT in the cat for being ill indoors, the cucumber frames were
damaged by the catapulting of boys going down the lane at the back,
and all your cucumbers were mysteriously em