I heard an immediate scamper of a chambermaid along the passage, and a shrill reply, as she ran, “Here it is! here’s the gentleman’s umbrella!”
“THAT WAS ALL I EVER SAW OF THE STOUT GENTLEMAN.”
The mysterious stranger then was on the point of setting off. This was the only chance I should ever have of knowing him. I sprang out of bed, scrambled to the window, snatched aside the curtains, and just caught a glimpse of the rear of a person getting in at the coach-door. The skirts of a brown coat parted behind, and gave me a full view of the broad disc of a pair of drab breeches. The door closed. “All right,” was the word; the coach whirled off—and that was all I ever saw of the Stout Gentleman.
Washington Irving.
MY SUMMER IN A GARDEN.
SECOND WEEK.
NEXT to deciding when to start your garden, the most important matter is, what to put in it. It is difficult to decide what to order for dinner on a given day: how much more oppressive is it to order in a lump an endless vista of dinners, so to speak! For, unless your garden is a boundless prairie (and mine seems to me to be that when I hoe it on hot days), you must make a selection, from the great variety of vegetables, of those you will raise in it; and you feel rather bound to supply your own table from your own garden, and to eat only as you have sown.
I hold that no man has a right (whatever his sex, of course) to have a garden to his own selfish uses. He ought not to please himself, but every man to please his neighbour. I tried to have a garden that would give general moral satisfaction. It seemed to me that nobody could object to potatoes (a most useful vegetable); and I began to plant them freely. But there was a chorus of protest against them. “You don’t want to take up your ground with potatoes,” the neighbours said: “you can buy potatoes” (the very thing I wanted to avoid doing is buying things). “What you want is the perishable things that you cannot get fresh in the market.”—“But what kind of perishable things?” A horticulturist of eminence wanted me to sow lines of strawberries and raspberries right over where I had put my potatoes in drills. I had about five hundred strawberry-plants in another part of my garden; but this fruit-fanatic wanted me to turn my whole patch into vines and runners. I suppose I could raise strawberries enough for all my neighbours; and perhaps I ought to do it. I had a little space prepared for melons,—musk-melons,—which I showed to an experienced friend. “You are not going to waste your ground on musk-melons?” he asked. “They rarely ripen in this climate thoroughly, before frost.” He had tried for years without luck. I resolved not to go into such a foolish experiment. But, the next day, another neighbour happened in. “Ah! I see you are going to have melons. My family would rather give up anything else in the garden than musk-melons,—of the nutmeg variety. They are the most grateful things we have on the table.” So there it was. There was no compromise: it was melons or no melons, and somebody offended in any case. I half resolved to plant them a little late, so that they would, and they wouldn’t. But I had the same difficulty about string-beans (which I detest), and squash (which I tolerate), and parsnips, and the whole round of green things.