commonly looked on as a cheap entertainment; but it
is really one of the most expensive. It is true that we can all have
front seats, and we do not exactly need to dress for it as we do for
the opera; but the conditions under which it is to be enjoyed are
rather dear. Among them I should name a good suit of clothes,
including some trifling ornament,--not including back hair for one
sex, or the parting of it in the middle for the other. I should add
also a good dinner, well cooked and digestible; and the cost of a
fair education, extended, perhaps, through generations in which
sensibility and love of beauty grew. What I mean is, that if a man
is hungry and naked, and half a savage, or with the love of beauty
undeveloped in him, a sunset is thrown away on him: so that it
appears that the conditions of the enjoyment of a sunset are as
costly as anything in our civilization.

Of course there is no such thing as absolute value in this world.
You can only estimate what a thing is worth to you. Does gardening
in a city pay? You might as well ask if it pays to keep hens, or a
trotting-horse, or to wear a gold ring, or to keep your lawn cut, or
your hair cut. It is as you like it. In a certain sense, it is a
sort of profanation to consider if my garden pays, or to set a
money-value upon my delight in it. I fear that you could not put it in
money. Job had the right idea in his mind when he asked, "Is there any
taste in the white of an egg?" Suppose there is not! What! shall I
set a price upon the tender asparagus or the crisp lettuce, which made
the sweet spring a reality? Shall I turn into merchandise the red
strawberry, the pale green pea, the high-flavored raspberry, the
sanguinary beet, that love-plant the tomato, and the corn which did not
waste its sweetness on the desert air, but, after flowing in a sweet
rill through all our summer life, mingled at last with the engaging
bean in a pool of succotash? Shall I compute in figures what daily
freshness and health and delight the garden yields, let alone the large
crop of anticipation I gathered as soon as the first seeds got above
ground? I appeal to any gardening man of sound mind, if that which
pays him best in gardening is not that which he cannot show in his
trial-balance. Yet I yield to public opinion, when I proceed to make
such a balance; and I do it with the utmost confidence in figures.

I select as a representative vegetable, in order to estimate the cost
of gardeni