This shows that the Chinaman cannot keep pace with the rapid strides now being made by American agriculture.
One day last week I had lost my appetite, and needed active bodily exertion, so I strolled over to the rat-eater's rural retreat, to watch Tue Long a few hours, and see if I couldn't get up an appetite.
The wind was blowing pretty fresh, as it sometimes does in this lovely clime, and Tue Long was trying to hold down some vulcanized rubber beets, and moss-agate asparagus. He wasn't succeeding very well, for just as he would get the beets driven into the ground securely, the zephyr would spring up from the south and blow the moss-agate asparagus all over the military reservation. Then while he would be giving his attention to the asparagus, the wailing winds would blow down his fence, and turn the tail of Tue Long's morning wrapper over his head, and leave his spinal column sticking up into the summer sky.
It seemed to be a bad day for agriculture, and Tue Long would alternately uncork some brocaded profanity, and then chase his hat, or do up his hair in a fresh Grecian coil I leaned over the fence, and laughing a low gurgling laugh, I said:
"Tue Long, you must learn to control your fiendish temper. Agriculture requires patience and serenity of disposition. You must always be cheerful and gentle. Always be pleasant and amiable in your home life. When the mountain wind uncoils your back-hair, and you cannot hold down the flap of your dressing sacque, you must not get mad and swear; but fill the air with merry laughter, just as Confucius used to do. Be a philosopher, and frown down these little annoyances."
Now, when I was propagating my Scotch-plaid summer squashes, the squash-bugs got in one morning before breakfast, and ate the vines. Soon after that I tried a new kind of fire-proof squash, with a hunting-case on it; but the squash-bugs took a spade and pried open the hunting-case, and ate the supreme stuffing out of every individual squash. I then tried the Bessemer-steel squash, with plaster of Paris works inside, but the irrigation was defective, and it never matured.
But, did I forget myself and swear like a Guinea hen, the way you do? Did I break forth into petulant remarks, and lower myself in the estimation of my neighbors?
Not to any remarkable degree.
I went to the stockholders of the Pioneer Canal Company and said, "Here, gentlemen, I am an inexperienced agriculturalist, and I do not succeed. Nothing grows under my watchful care but the speckled squash-bug, and the fresh water cut worm. You are old, horny-handed sons of toil, and practical tillers of the soil; what shall I do?"
Then the secretary called a meeting of the stockholders, and the matter was discussed. The general custodian of peculiar seeds and rare bulbs was ordered to select certain seeds from the bureau, and give them to me for trial. Among these were the seeds of the early dwarf salad oil vine, the Northern spy horse radish, the black and tan Lima bean, the non-explosive codfish ball, the soda water melon, the grammatical sugar beet, and the anti-cut worm asbestos string bean.