r
gardens on land also,--the bottoms of the deepest hollows being selected
for the purpose,--and by hook or by crook manage to coax a kind of
return out of the poverty-stricken soil. Even on Cape Cod there must be
some potatoes to go with the fish. Vegetables raised under such
difficulties are naturally sweet to the taste, and I was not so much
surprised, therefore, on a certain state occasion at the Castle, to see
a mighty dish of string beans ladled into soup-plates and exalted to the
dignity of a separate course. Here, too,--but this was in Dyer's
Hollow,--I found in successful operation one of the latest, and, if I
may venture an unprofessional opinion, one of the most valuable,
improvements in the art of husbandry. An old man, an ancient mariner, no
doubt, was seated on a camp-stool and plying a hoe among his cabbages.
He was bent nearly double with age ("triple" is the word in my notebook,
but that may have been an exaggeration), and had learned wisdom with
years. I regretted afterward that I had not got over the fence and
accosted him. I could hardly have missed hearing something rememberable.
Yet I may have done wisely to keep the road. Industry like his ought
never to be intruded upon lightly. Some, I dare say, would have called
the sight pathetic. To me it was rather inspiring. Only a day or two
before, in another part of the township, I had seen a man sitting in a
chair among his bean-poles picking beans. Those heavy, sandy roads and
steep hills must be hard upon the legs, and probably the dwellers
thereabout (unlike the Lombardy poplars, which there, as elsewhere, were
decaying at the top) begin to die at the lower extremities. It was not
many miles from Dyer's Hollow that Thoreau fell in with the old wrecker,
"a regular Cape Cod man," of whom he says that "he looked as if he
sometimes saw a doughnut, but never descended to comfort." Quite
otherwise was it with my wise-hearted agricultural economists; and quite
otherwise shall it be with me, also, who mean to profit by their
example. If I am compelled to dig when I get old (to beg may I ever be
ashamed!), I am determined not to forget the camp-stool. The Cape Cod
motto shall be mine,--He that hoeth cabbages, let him do it with
assiduity.

[8] In looking over the town history, I was pleased to come upon a note
in defense of this lowly plant, on the score not only of its beauty, but
of its usefulness in holding the sand in place; but, alas, "all men have
not