“Well, yer honor knows best; but when a roof hasn’t any shingles on, it lakes purty bad.”
“Patrick,” I said, pausing and looking at him sternly, “what on earth do you mean by saying one minute that you have a roof, and the next that you have none?”
“Well, yer honor knows the boards for the roof is all there, and put up beautiful, but I hadn’t any shingles, more’s the pity, and me paying rint all the time, and me frind with nothing to do until he gets some work, and no telling the day when he may do that. And I thought perhaps yer honor will give me the loan of some shingles, and keep the house yerself until I could work it out. The windies ain’t much matter, and boards will do very well, but sure a house is good for nothing intirely unless it has a roof on it.”
I coincided fully in Patrick’s views; there was a bond of brotherhood in suffering between us; and although I did not keep his house for him, he had his shingles. And so he was fairly housed, and my extra story being completed, and the garden having at last consented to grow, and the trees to furnish foliage and give yearly promise of fruit, and my vast experience having been carefully stored away for the use of others, and myself finally and peremptorily settled in the country, I think it is time that I closed this veracious and trustworthy account of “Five Acres more than Enough.”
CHAPTER XXI.
THREE HUNDRED ACRES NOT ENOUGH.
I AM writing this supplementary chapter after the expiration of nearly fifteen years since the record of my farming experiences was commenced; and while I have nothing to take from the interesting statements which have been set forth in the previous pages, I have much to add to them. Everything has gone on as it began, with the same invariable pleasure, profit, and satisfaction. The field and the fields of my labor have alike been one long delight—from the soft yellow of the upturned surfaces when the plough had just prepared them for the seeds, through their period of emerald-green promise and their crowning glories of fruitful russet and gold, till they passed under the snow-white mantle of their wintry death. My success on “five acres” was so triumphant that I purchased a farm of twenty-five at Rockville Centre, and subsequently one of two hundred at Sayville, and to those have kept perpetually adding till they number three hundred and fifty, and bid fair never to be enough. My feet have trodden all the highways and by-ways of successful agriculture, and my efforts have done much to solve the great problem that the world has been groping over for four thousand years; for only when science shall teach just how much hydrogen, nitrogen, super-phosphate, hydrocephalus, tredecem radiatus, esox reticulatus, and cerebro-spinal meningitis make up the component parts of every stalk of corn, grain of wheat, or head of oats will the human race be redeemed from darkness and ignorance, and all men made rich and happy.
Patrick and I built hot-beds and cold-frames; and if the hot-beds did come out cold-frames, and the cold-frames occasionally endeavored to be hot-beds by burning up all the plants in them, we were sure to get one or the other almost every time. Moreover, we have had our triumphs as great as those of war. We have raised the mammoth squash, a miniature planet of orange loveliness, bursting with beauty and solid with succulence—so roomy, that Cinderella would have found no trouble in using it for her coach, or Peter Piper for a wife-protector. It was sent to the county fair, where it was much admired by my friends, and caused much envy in the mind of Weeville, to judge from the disparaging remarks he indulged about the taste and value of squashes. It would have taken the prize were it not that another farmer had sent one a few pounds heavier, although far inferior in contour and general excellence of expression. Ours should have had a second prize, but that the chief official informed me that they never gave second prizes for squashes.
Of course there have been drawbacks, but what mattered it if the commonplaces did not come up to expectation, if the turnips and carrots failed and the grass dried up. Who could not spare the horse vegetables in the land of the pea, the Lima-bean, the asparagus?—where there was never too much heat or drought for the sweet corn, and where the luxuriant egg-plants would spread out their broad green hands to the generous sun in gratitude for his rays in summer, and would round out their purple globes in the cool days of September and October—that is, when the potato-bug did not eat them all up. Insects have become rather over-abundant. Indeed this might be said to be the bug age, in contrast with the stone age and the iron age and the golden age which have passed before. There is every known and unknown sort of insect on Long Island. The Colorado beetle paid his respects promptly, on his evolution, and has remained permanently; the borers bore our apple-trees; the curculio swarms in our plum-trees; moths and army-worms and tent-caterpillars and every other sort of creeping and stinging thing assist our labors and share our profits.
The poor broken-backed farmer has fallen upon the day of small things—the winged, creeping, crawling, and ever-devouring small things of six legs and more or less wings and unlimited stomach; those that delve in the ground and worm their way into roots, or climb up the branches and eat the leaves, or which strike the fruit and spot and blight it. He must poison the potato-beetle, he must burn the galleys and cities of the tent-builders, he must prod the borers with wires. By comparison with these the hum of the ever-present mosquito is but a humbug, and his bites flea-bites.
Following the directions of enthusiastic bug sportsmen I tried to inveigle the innocent moths into the candle of destruction. Patrick was directed, to place a lamp in the orchard and set it in a pan of water with kerosene oil on the surface. There was every reason to expect that the moths from their known weakness for light would have rushed to this death-trap by myriads. But Patrick soon gave the most discouraging accounts of bug behavior and insect artifice.