and whiter
at the center, and crisp in their maturity. Lettuce, like
conversation, requires a good deal of oil to avoid friction, and keep
the company smooth; a pinch of attic salt; a dash of pepper; a quantity
of mustard and vinegar, by all means, but so mixed that you will notice
no sharp contrasts; and a trifle of sugar. You can put anything, and
the more things the better, into salad, as into a conversation; but
everything depends upon the skill of mixing. I feel that I am in the
best society when I am with lettuce. It is in the select circle of
vegetables. The tomato appears well on the table; but you do not want
to ask its origin. It is a most agreeable parvenu. Of course, I have
said nothing about the berries. They live in another and more ideal
region; except, perhaps, the currant. Here we see, that, even among
berries, there are degrees of breeding. The currant is well enough,
clear as truth, and exquisite in color; but I ask you to notice how far
it is from the exclusive hauteur of the aristocratic strawberry, and
the native refinement of the quietly elegant raspberry.

I do not know that chemistry, searching for protoplasm, is able to
discover the tendency of vegetables. It can only be found out by
outward observation. I confess that I am suspicious of the bean, for
instance. There are signs in it of an unregulated life. I put up
the most attractive sort of poles for my Limas. They stand high and
straight, like church-spires, in my theological garden,--lifted
up; and some of them have even budded, like Aaron's rod. No
church-steeple in a New England village was ever better fitted to draw
to it the rising generation on Sunday, than those poles to lift up my
beans towards heaven. Some of them did run up the sticks seven feet,
and then straggled off into the air in a wanton manner; but more than
half of them went gallivanting off to the neighboring grape-trellis,
and wound their tendrils with the tendrils of the grape, with a
disregard of the proprieties of life which is a satire upon human
nature. And the grape is morally no better. I think the ancients, who
were not troubled with the recondite mystery of protoplasm, were right
in the mythic union of Bacchus and Venus.

Talk about the Darwinian theory of development, and the principle of
natural selection! I should like to see a garden let to run in
accordance with it. If I had left my vegetables and weeds to a free
fight, in which the strongest specimens on