both lawns, and trenched and manured in spasms of immense vigour

alternating with periods of paralysing distaste for the garden. And

for weeks he talked about eight hundred pounds an acre at every

meal.

A garden, even when it is not exasperated by intensive methods, is a

thing as exacting as a baby, its moods have to he watched; it does

not wait upon the cultivator's convenience, but has times of its

own. Intensive culture greatly increases thisdisposition to

trouble mankind; it makes a gardentouchy and hysterical, a drugged

and demoralised and over-irritated garden. My father got at cross

purposes with our two patches at an early stage. Everythinggrew

wrong from the first to last, and if my father's manures intensified

nothing else, they certainly intensified the Primordial Curse. The

peas were eaten in the night before they were three inches high, the

beans bore nothing but blight, the only apparent result of a

spraying of the potatoes was to develop a PENCHANT in the cat for

being ill indoors, the cucumber frames were damaged by the

catapulting of boys going down the lane at the back, and all your

cucumbers were mysteriously embittered. That lane with its

occasional passers-by did much to wreck the intensive scheme,

because my father always stopped work and went indoors if any one

watched him. His special manure was apt to arouse a troublesome

spirit of inquiry in hardy natures.

In digging his rows and shaping his patches he neglected the guiding

string and trusted to his eye altogether too much, and the

consequent obliquity and the various wind-breaks and scare-crows he

erected, and particularly an irrigation contrivance he began and

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