"All cut!"
"Oh, yes. We need that piece for pasturage."
"Oh, dear! We might as well not have a farm if we cut down all the birches."
"We might as well not have a farm if we don't cut them down. They'll run us out in no time."
"They don't look as if they would run anybody out—the dears!"
"Why, I didn't know you felt that way about them. We'll let that other patch stand, if you like."
"If I like!"
I saved the birches, but other things kept happening. I went out one day and found one of our prettiest fence lines reduced to bare bones, all its bushes and vines—clematis, elderberry, wild cherry, sweet-fern, bitter-sweet—all cut, hacked, torn away. It looked like a collie dog in the summer when his long yellow fur has been sheared off. And, another day, it was a company of red lilies escaped along a bank above the roadside. There were weeds mixed in, to be sure, and some bushes, a delightful tangle—and all snipped, shaved to the skin!
When I spoke about it, Jonathan said: "I'm sorry. I suppose Hiram was just making the place shipshape."
"Shipshape! This farm shipshape! You could no more make this farm shipshape than you could make a woodchuck look as though he had been groomed. The farm isn't a ship."