A feeling of awe
came over me, as we lay there at midnight, hushed by the sound of the
stream and the rising wind in the spruce-tops. Then man can go nowhere
that "pusley" will not attend him. Though he camp on the Upper Au Sable,
or penetrate the forest where rolls the Allegash, and hear no sound save
his own allegations, he will not escape it. It has entered the happy
valley of Keene, although there is yet no church there, and only a
feeble school part of the year. Sin travels faster than they that ride
in chariots. I take my hoe, and begin; but I feel that I am warring
against something whose roots take hold on H.

By the time a man gets to be eighty, he learns that he is compassed
by limitations, and that there has been a natural boundary set to his
individual powers. As he goes on in life, he begins to doubt his ability
to destroy all evil and to reform all abuses, and to suspect that there
will be much left to do after he has done. I stepped into my garden in
the spring, not doubting that I should be easily master of the weeds. I
have simply learned that an institution which is at least six thousand
years old, and I believe six millions, is not to be put down in one
season.

I have been digging my potatoes, if anybody cares to know it. I planted
them in what are called "Early Rose,"--the rows a little less than three
feet apart; but the vines came to an early close in the drought. Digging
potatoes is a pleasant, soothing occupation, but not poetical. It is
good for the mind, unless they are too small (as many of mine are),
when it begets a want of gratitude to the bountiful earth. What small
potatoes we all are, compared with what we might be! We don't plow deep
enough, any of us, for one thing. I shall put in the plow next year, and
give the tubers room enough. I think they felt the lack of it this
year: many of them seemed ashamed to come out so small. There is great
pleasure in turning out the brown-jacketed fellows into the sunshine
of a royal September day, and seeing them glisten as they lie thickly
strewn on the warm soil. Life has few such moments. But then they must
be picked up. The picking-up, in this world, is always the unpleasant
part of it.

SIXTEENTH WEEK

I do not hold myself bound to answer the question, Does gardening pay?
It is so difficult to define what is meant by paying. There is a popular
notion that, unless a thing pays, you had better let it alone; and I
may say that there is