My wife thinks Campbell is just about right. When he began to talk about how he'd enjoy fixing her garden, and would she please let him have the hoe, rake, spade, and a bucket to tote sod from a pile in the front yard, she began to look upon him as a Dispensation of Providence. Agriculturally, I dwindled in importance as he expanded.
He cut five rows, or furrows, or ditches, or whatever you call them, with the hoe, and into them he dropped peas, beans, onions, parsley, and parsnips. Then he brought buckets of top soil and dumped it on the seeds along the line, and raked the soil over until it was smooth, and stuck the empty envelopes at the end of the rows for fear my wife would get the peas identified as corn, the beans as peanuts, the onions as cauliflower, the parsley as rhubarb, the parsnips as turnips. Campbell let me bring some more buckets of soil. For that favor I have begun to question the degree of Campbell's kindness.
Then I spoke.
"Your rows of top soil will start the seeds," I said, "but never maintain them when they're out. We must get some commercial fertilizer, and the minute the sprouts show, sprinkle it along the sides of the furrows. Then we must soak the farm with a hose."
My wife sneered. "He's right," said Campbell. My wife winked at him to carry on the joke, but he insisted in sign language that I really had the proper dope. She wilted.
"Now," I said, "we'll have William throw five loads of top soil into this next patch, over which we will run a plough, mixing it not less than a foot deep. Then we'll cover it down, roll it and soak it for a week. We will then be ready to plant our tomato vines and more onions, along the rows of which we'll sprinkle our fertilizer about two sacks to ten yards. This temporary work you've done is about as practical as a school of journalism or poetry. We'll let it stand as a horrible example, but all this goes under, too, in the fall. Then we'll dig trenches around the yard, a foot deep, fill in solid with top soil and after a week of settling plant a double row of hedge, one foot apart in length and six inches apart in width. Am I right?"
I had her gasping. She stared at me in wonder, and Campbell—well, he just stood with his mouth open like a catfish, admiring and astounded.
That day when a man becomes a hero in his wife's eyes is a triumph such as Napoleon never knew in his greatest moments, and the feel of it outdoes the joy of a Nero in the plaudits of the claque. It isn't necessary to mention that I got it out of a bulletin from the agricultural department.