nder that the tropical people, where
Nature never goes to sleep, give it up, and sit in lazy acquiescence.

Here I have been working all the season to make a piece of lawn. It had
to be graded and sowed and rolled; and I have been shaving it like
a barber. When it was soft, everything had a tendency to go on to
it,--cows, and especially wandering hackmen. Hackmen (who are a product
of civilization) know a lawn when they see it. They rather have a fancy
for it, and always try to drive so as to cut the sharp borders of it,
and leave the marks of their wheels in deep ruts of cut-up, ruined turf.
The other morning, I had just been running the mower over the lawn, and
stood regarding its smoothness, when I noticed one, two, three puffs
of fresh earth in it; and, hastening thither, I found that the mole
had arrived to complete the work of the hackmen. In a half-hour he had
rooted up the ground like a pig. I found his run-ways. I waited for him
with a spade. He did not appear; but, the next time I passed by, he had
ridged the ground in all directions,--a smooth, beautiful animal, with
fur like silk, if you could only catch him. He appears to enjoy the lawn
as much as the hackmen did. He does not care how smooth it is. He is
constantly mining, and ridging it up. I am not sure but he could be
countermined. I have half a mind to put powder in here and there, and
blow the whole thing into the air. Some folks set traps for the mole;
but my moles never seem to go twice in the same place. I am not sure but
it would bother them to sow the lawn with interlacing snake-grass (the
botanical name of which, somebody writes me, is devil-grass: the first
time I have heard that the Devil has a botanical name), which would
worry them, if it is as difficult for them to get through it as it is
for me.

I do not speak of this mole in any tone of complaint. He is only a
part of the untiring resources which Nature brings against the humble
gardener. I desire to write nothing against him which I should wish to
recall at the last,--nothing foreign to the spirit of that beautiful
saying of the dying boy, "He had no copy-book, which, dying, he was
sorry he had blotted."

EIGHTH WEEK

My garden has been visited by a High Official Person. President Gr-nt
was here just before the Fourth, getting his mind quiet for that event
by a few days of retirement, staying with a friend at the head of our
street; and I asked him if he wouldn't like to come