"No," I replied idiotically; "I am running a footrace with an angle-worm!"
The Duke of Mont Alto whizzed by in his automobile and waved his hand. He tooted twice. I think he was kidding me. A friend, wending homeward with his dinnerpail, paused to observe that it was hot weather for digging. That self-consciousness that makes the whole world miserable on occasion seized me. From every window I imagined delighted neighbors looking on; in the twitter of the birds I heard merry giggles.
But against and in spite of all these handicaps I persisted. I had as implements, in addition to Cain's spade—how I love that connection!—one table knife, one garden claw, one trowel, one sharp stick, one cracked hoe, and one perfectly good vocabulary. I went after the clay ground with my hands in preference to any or all of the tools, and after half an hour of agony had removed, by actual count, one hundred and thirty-seven large stones and a small pile of pebbles, none of the pebbles weighing more than one pound. Then with my hands I crumbled the dirt chunks into powder and carefully sifted, smoothed off, rolled, tumbled, and otherwise adjusted the net product.
Sweat is the fluid excreted from the sudoriferous glands of the skin.
The sudoriferous glands of Yours Truly worked overtime. Yours Truly excreted, exuded, flooded. To be swimming around in your own atmosphere is a novel and sometimes pleasurable experience. It's funny how a man bowls sixteen-ounce balls until his ribs crack and sits in a Turkish bath until each pore is a geyser, and yet when that same result is obtained by means of honest labor and by pushing a spade, he complains.
I cut the lines of this little front garden deep and clean, and sloped the pulverized earth back so that there would be a perpetual irrigation in the ditch from the overflow. Rather clever idea, that. Then my wife got out the dwarf nasturtium seeds and we put them in a box, and the box in the conservatory, and myself into the shower. I don't see how a farmer can get along without a shower in the house.
We had about six hundred nasturtium seeds in envelopes bearing totally misleading pictures of what they will look like. I filled a box with rough earth and then pulverized it with an ice-pick. Then I stuck holes with my finger and put one seed in each hole. After my fingernails had developed into a screaming argument for the use of soap, my wife discovered that I had planted them too deep.
"You'll have to take them all out and plant them again," she said.
I scratched my head, standing thoughtfully on one foot the while.