tranquillity of the house, his hands and clothes intensively

enriched. He would come in like a whirlwind. "This damned stuff

all over me and the Agricultural Chemistry Class at six! Bah!

AAAAAAH!"

My mother would never learn not to attempt to break him of swearing

on such occasions. She would remain standing a little stiffly in

the scullery refusing to assist him to the adjectival towel he

sought.

"If you say such things-"

He would dance with rage and hurl the soap about. "The towel!" he

would cry, flicking suds from big fingers in every direction; "the

towel! I'll let the blithering class slide if you don't give me the

towel! I'll give up everything, I tell you-everything!"…

At last with the failure of the lettuces came the breaking point. I

was in the little arbour learning Latin irregular verbs when it

happened. I cansee him still, his peculiar tenor voice still

echoes in my brain, shouting his opinion of intensive culture for

all the world tohear, and slashing away at that abominable mockery

of a crop with a hoe. We had tied them up with bast only a week or

so before, and now half were rotten and half had shot up into tall

slender growths. He had the hoe in both hands and slogged. Great

wipes he made, and at each stroke he said, "Take that!"

The air was thick with flying fragments of abortive salad. It was a

fantastic massacre. It was the French Revolution of that cold

tyranny, the vindictive overthrow of the pampered vegetable

aristocrats. After he had assuaged his passion upon them, he turned

for other prey; he kicked holes in two of ournoblest marrows,

flicked off the heads of half a row of artichokes, and shied the hoe

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