“Sure, ain’t me frind Dan Morrissy one o’ the selictmen?” said Mike, “and ain’t he the road boss, and ain’t he willin’ to earn an extra penny for–for the town?”
“H’m,” said I; “for the town! Well, I’ve got to have this lawn! You get your friend Dan in the morning. Just the same, I don’t love the town so much that I want a 250-foot lawn.”
I took my line of stakes back 150 feet, and replanted them. That gave me a more intimate lawn, like a large outdoor south room, I thought. It also increased my vegetable garden acreage. I returned to the scraper and the patient horse with a new humbleness, a new realization of what one man cannot do in a day. That, perhaps, is one of the first and most important lessons of farming and gardening. Once you have learned it, you are either discouraged or fired anew with the persistence of patience. I was not discouraged. Besides, I had Mike’s friend Dan, the selectman, to fall back on! It is always well to be friends with Tammany Hall. First, I decided not to grade even my smaller lawn to a dead level, but merely to smooth it off, letting that process counteract the slope as much as it would. Then I started to scoop again, bringing down the soil from the higher western side directly to the south face of my house and dumping it there, to be packed into a terrace which next season should be the floor of my pergola.
Did you ever try to handle a drag scraper and drive the horse at the same time, dear reader? It requires more muscle and as much patience as golf. Joe offered to come and drive for me, but I preferred him to plant, and kept on by myself. It is amazing how much dirt you can dump in one place without increasing the pile perceptibly. The only thing more amazing is the amount of dirt you can take out of one place without perceptibly increasing the depth of your hole. I ran the scoop along the edge of my proposed grape arbour time after time, dumping the contents in front of my new south door, but still that first furrow didn’t sink more than six inches, and still the sills of my house rose above the piles. Noon came and found me with aching arms and strained shoulder sockets. I had brought some lunch, to save the walk back to Mrs. Temple’s, and I took it into my big south room to eat it. Hard was in there eating his. The plumbers were eating theirs in the new kitchen, already completed.
Hard, I found, had begun the bookcase, which was just the height of the mantels. He had been preparing the top moulding with his universal plane when noon came, and the sweet shavings lay curled on the floor. I scuffed my feet in them, and even hung one from my ear, as children do, while Hard Cider regarded me scornfully.
“I’m going to have great times in this room!” I exclaimed. “Books between the fireplaces, books along the walls, just a few pictures, including my Hiroshiges, over the mantels, my desk by the west window, and out there the green garden! A man ought to write something pretty good in this room, eh?”
Hard looked at me with narrowed eyes. “I don’t know nothin’ about writin’,” he said, “but it ’pears to me a feller could write most anywhar pervided he had somethin’ ter say.”
Whereupon Hard concluded by biting into a large piece of prune pie.
The Yankee temperament is occasionally depressing! I went outdoors again, eating my doughnuts as I walked, and strolled into the vegetable garden to survey the staked rows which denoted beets and peas. Then I went down the slope into my little stand of pines, into the cool hush of them, and unconsciously my brain relaxed in the bath of their peace, and for ten minutes I lay on the needles, neither asleep nor awake, just blissfully vacant. Then I returned to my scooping, marvellously rested.
I scooped till three o’clock, led the horse back to the barn, got a shovel and rake, and began to spread my terrace. As this south end of my house (and accordingly my big south room) was but thirty-three feet long, the task was not very severe, particularly as the upper, or western, end, did not require much grading. I built the terrace out about twelve feet from the wall, stamped up and down on it to pack it, and raked it smooth. I realized that it would settle, of course, and I should need more earth yet upon it before it was sown down to grass, or, if I could afford it, bricked; but in order to hold the bank, I got some grass seed and planted the edge, and also got a couple of planks to stretch from the south door across the terrace and down to the lawn, until I could build my proposed brick path and steps. It was six o’clock when I had finished. Palm-sore and weary, I drank a great tin dipperful of water from my copper pump in the kitchen, took a last look at Hard’s bookcase, which had already been built out the required five feet into the room along the line of the old partition, fourteen inches wide to hold books on both sides, tried the doors to see that they were locked, and tramped up the dusty road to supper.