igured with
monstrous protrusions through their very centres,--something that looked
like a second bud pushing through the middle of the corolla; lettuces
and cabbages would not head; radishes knotted themselves until they
looked like centenerians' fingers; and on every stem, on every leaf,
and both sides of it, and at the root of everything that dew, was a
professional specialist in the shape of grub, caterpillar, aphis, or
other expert, whose business it was to devour that particular part,
and help order the whole attempt at vegetation. Such experiences must
influence a child born to them. A sandy soil, where nothing flourishes
but weeds and evil beasts of small dimensions, must breed different
qualities in its human offspring from one of those fat and fertile spots
which the wit whom I have once before noted described so happily that,
if I quoted the passage, its brilliancy would spoil one of my pages, as
a diamond breastpin sometimes kills the social effect of the wearer, who
might have passed for a gentleman without it. Your arid patch of earth
should seem to the natural birthplace of the leaner virtues and the
abler vices,--of temperance and the domestic proprieties on the one
hand, with a tendency to light weights in groceries and provisions, and
to clandestine abstraction from the person on the other, as opposed to
the free hospitality, the broadly planned burglaries, and the largely
conceived homicides of our rich Western alluvial regions. Yet Nature is
never wholly unkind. Economical as she was in my unparadised Eden, hard
as it was to make some of my floral houris unveil, still the damask
roses sweetened the June breezes, the bladed and plumed flower-de-luces
unfolded their close-wrapped cones, and larkspurs and lupins, lady's
delights,--plebeian manifestations of the pansy,--self-sowing marigolds,
hollyhocks, the forest flowers of two seasons, and the perennial lilacs
and syringas,--all whispered to' the winds blowing over them that some
caressing presence was around me.

Beyond the garden was "the field," a vast domain of four acres or
thereabout, by the measurement of after years, bordered to the north by
a fathomless chasm,--the ditch the base-ball players of the present era
jump over; on the east by unexplored territory; on the south by a barren
enclosure, where the red sorrel proclaimed liberty and equality under
its drapeau rouge, and succeeded in establishing a vegetable commune
where all were alike,