lled a garden. So destitute was it of any intelligent plan and so
uncared for that it seemed almost to have a conscious, awkward
self-contempt. In the flecked shade of a rude trellis of grapes that
sheltered a side door two children of the household fell to work with
great parade at a small machine, setting bristles into tooth-brushes for
a neighboring factory, but it was amusingly plain that their labor was
spasmodic and capricious.

The mother was away on a business errand. The father was present. He had
done his day's stint in the cutlery works very early, and with five
hours of sunlight yet before him had no use to make of them but to sit
on a bowlder on the crest of the pleasant hill and smoke and whittle.
Had he been mentally trained he might, without leaving that stone, have
turned those hours into real living, communing with nature and his own
mind; but he had, as half an eye could see, no developed powers of
observation, reflection or imagination, and probably, for sheer want of
practice, could not have fixed his attention on a worthy book through
five of its pages. The question that arose in the minds of his visitors
comes again here: what could have been so good to keep idleness from
breeding its swarm of evils in his brain and hands--and home--as for
somebody, something, somehow, to put it into his head--well--for
example--to make a garden? A garden, we will say, that should win a
prize, and--even though it failed to win--should render him and his
house and household more interesting to himself, his neighbors and his
town.

He and his house seemed to be keeping the Ten Commandments in a
slouching sort of way and we may even suppose they were out of
debt--money debt; yet already they were an unconscious menace to
society; their wage-earning powers had outgrown their wants. Outgrown
them not because the wages were too high but because their wants were
too low; were only wants of the body, wants of the barrenest unculture;
_the inelastic wants_.

That is "my own invention," that phrase! The bodily wants of a reptile
are elastic. If an alligator or a boa-constrictor catches a dog he can
swallow him whole and enjoy that one meal in unriotous bliss for weeks.
Thereafter if he must put up with no more than a minnow or a mouse he
can do that for weeks in unriotous patience. In a spring in one of our
Northampton gardens I saw a catfish swallow a frog so big that the hind
toes stuck out of the devourer's mouth for