“I never saw anything like it to grow,” continued Clinton. “I’ve cleaned out every spear of it from this ground three times this summer, and yet see how it has grown. It is almost impossible to kill it. The roots will grow right through a potato, or a chip, or almost anything that happens to be in the way. I left a handful on the fence-rail last spring, and the first thing I knew it had taken root in the wood, and was growing finely. Father says that when he was a boy they used to say that the only way to kill it was to dry it, and then put it in your pipe and smoke it, and be very careful of the ashes.”
“Does it bother you so every year?” inquired Whistler.
“No,” replied his cousin; “this is the first time we have had any in this piece of ground, and nobody knows how it came here. I suppose a few seeds got scattered here somehow or other. Before the ground is planted again, it will have to be dug all over with a ten-tined fork. That will clear it out, if anything will.”
“If father was here now,” said Whistler, “how he would moralize over this witch-grass! I can imagine just how he would talk. He’d say, ‘That’s right, boys!—pull away! This witch-grass has all got to come out, at some rate or other. It’s an abominable pest, isn’t it? Well, it’s just like a bad habit in a man’s mind.—It’s no trouble at all to get it started; but if he ever wants to get rid of it, what a time he’ll have of it! Why, he’ll have to be raked fore and aft with the ten-tined fork of tribulation, and then he won’t be sure that he has got all the plaguy roots out.’”
The half-serious, half-comic air with which this was said, and the amusing imitation which Whistler gave of his father’s manner, proved too much for Clinton’s gravity, and he indulged in a hearty laugh, in spite of the excellent moral so queerly brought to his mind. It was not Whistler’s design, however, to make sport of his father. He had merely given as faithful an imitation as he could of what his father might have said, could he have looked in upon the boys just at that moment. Mr. Davenport, when in the company of his children, lost no opportunity of drawing lessons of instruction from the natural world, and from the daily events that happened around them; and this habit had so impressed itself upon Whistler’s mind, that he often found himself instinctively imitating his example.
The boys, who were now some distance apart, worked on in silence a short time, when suddenly Whistler gave a vigorous stroke with his hoe, and then said, as if talking to himself:
“There, old fellow,—you’re fixed now!”
“What is that?” inquired Clinton.
“A toad.”
“Did you kill him?”