n its
first chapter. This introduction will consist of two illustrations. The
first relates to the planting of potatoes. When I inherited my ancestral
estate, known as "Crusoe's Well," I resolved to devote it to potatoes
for the first summer. I summoned my vassals, and we fenced it. I bought
dung and manured it. I hired ploughmen and oxen, and they ploughed it. I
made a covenant with a Kelt, who became, _quoad hoc_, my slave, and gave
to him money, with which I directed him to buy seed-potatoes and plant
it.

And he,--"How many shall I buy?"

I retired to my study, consulted London, Lindley, and Linnaeus,--the
thick Gray, the middling Gray, and the child's Gray,--Worcester's
Dictionary, and Webster's, in both of which you can usually find almost
anything but what should be there,--Johnson's "Dictionary of Gardening,"
and Gardner's "Dictionary of Farming,"--and none of these treatises
mentioned the quantity of potatoes proper for planting a given space of
land. Even the Worcester and Webster failed. I was reduced to tell the
Kelt to ask the huckster of whom he bought. All the treatises went on
the principle--true, but inadequate--that "any fool would know." Any
fool might, probably does,--but I was not a fool.

The next year, having built my house and taken Lois home, the bluebirds
sang spring to us one fine morning, and we went out to plant our
radish-seeds. With fit forethought, the seed had been bought, the ground
manured and raked, the string, the dibble, the woman's trowel, the man's
trowel, the sticks for the seed-papers, and the papers were all there.
Lois was charming, in her sun-bonnet; I looked knowing in my Canadian
oat-straw. We marked out the bed,--as the robins, meadow-larks, and
bluebirds directed. Lois then looked up article "Radish" in the
"Farmer's Dictionary," and we found the lists of "Long White Naples,"
"White Spanish," "Black Spanish," "Long Scarlet," "White Turnip-Root,"
"Purple Turnip," and the rest, for two columns, which we should and
should not plant. All that was nothing to us. We were to plant
radish-seeds, which we had bought, as such, from Mr. Swett. How deep to
plant them, how far apart or how near together, the book was to tell.
But the book only said, "Everybody knows how to plant radishes."

Now this was not true. _We_ did not know.

These two illustrations, as the minister says, are sufficient to show
the character of the deficiency which I am now to supply,--which young
houseke