I got the rake, shovel, spade, hoe, hand cultivator, lawn mower, trowel, and a couple of things you lift young plants with and assembled myself on the lawn to put in a good day's work. With the rake I started to rake off the side yard, and got about halfway through when I discovered that the lawn needed mowing. Halfway through with the mowing job my eye spotted certain thick spots of weeds, and so I started weeding. Halfway through with that I stopped to pick up sticks and stones and throw them, as usual, over my neighbor's lot. Then it was this thing and that thing, never finishing anything, until finally I chucked all things and started something new.
That's the way with enthusiasts. For finishing a job, give me the plodder whose imagination is subordinate to his hoe. You see, he is a one-idea man, and the idea may not be his own; but the fellow with the genius for starting things is very seldom there at the finish. He dreams large and turns the details over to more successful men.
This new thing I started concerns the front plot of garden around the porch. It was a disorganized thing as it stood. I cut out a ditch in front of it, piled all the dirt back against the house and toted baskets of hard stones from a neighboring lot. These I leaned against the sides of the ditch and hammered them in, or cut out the earth and set, making a stone wall that would retain the earth, hold a certain amount of water for irrigation and at the same time be ornamental. It took two hours to make as many yards of this stuff, and several friends called attention to the trouble I was taking for no necessary purpose. Well, that may be so—and probably is—but it is so stupid to be always doing the necessary things, living on the obvious, plugging along on the course of existence that is common to all.
NINTH PERIOD
By the time I had worn my finger nails to a state of complete dishabille—happy thought!—and had become a hopeless problem for the most sanguine manicurist, I began to learn things really. For instance, this is how a lawn ought to be made:
First, grade your ground, then remove all stones and stumps; next roll it and then put on a couple of inches of top soil; then roll that until there isn't a bump in it, sow your grass seed and water constantly, prayerfully. In making our lawn those are the things they didn't do.
I don't dare rake our lawn, because the minute I start, out will come a lot of bolders, leaving terrific yawns in the sod. I'm sure the Duke will forgive me for getting peeved about that lawn, when he understands that there are callouses in my hands and knots in my lawn mower. Also, why on earth, after throwing on the grass seed, do the men drive wagons over it and make ruts and jam their heels into it and make holes, where my vagrant sprinklings with the hose create lakes and puddles and produce never a single grass?