These little private vexations were about all that we encountered during the whole progress of our strawberry-planting. The neighbors, with the exception of the Tetchys, having no particular interest as to how we got along or whether we got along at all, very soon ceased to take any notice of what we were doing. The novelty of the new enterprise died away as speedily, for the season at least, as if we had been sowing turnips. Under the fine October weather, the plants quickly took root, and went on growing so vigorously that some of them even put out an occasional runner. But these were immediately clipped off, as sure to impair the vigor of the plant, which could now support no extraneous offshoots. There were some plants, however, that apparently stood still, refusing to grow, while others died out entirely. But casualties of this sort are always to be expected. They occur with old hands at strawberry-planting, and beginners must not think to escape them.
I felt inexpressibly proud of my achievement. I watched this work of my own hands so closely, being up and in the garden long before breakfast, that I think the very shape and position of every plant came to be imprinted on my memory. I know that I could detect the changes that took place in the look of each particular pet. I thought of them when operating the treadle of my sewing-machine at the factory, and I hurried home more expeditiously than aforetime, to enjoy even the brief autumn twilight among my strawberries. I sometimes even dreamed of them on my pillow. Now my agricultural library became far more interesting and useful than before. I had had a touch of real, actual practice, and could already understand and appreciate many suggestions which had heretofore been of doubtful significancy. Thus the long winter came gradually in, closing up the great volume of vegetable life, but affording me abundant time for studying that other volume which had so singularly fallen in my way.
Who made all the old saws?--not the rusty steel affairs that Patrick and John ply upon Down-East fire-wood at our back doors,--but those sharp-pointed, trenchant ones that philosophers love to draw across the hearts of men, cutting, tearing, grinding away, till the fibre of their being quivers under the remorseless teeth. Many were forged, we all know, in the celebrated workshop of W. Shakspeare; other particularly fine-toothed ones were pointed by a French artisan named Rochefoucauld; and many more, bright and lucent, are borrowed--reverently be it spoken!--from that grand arsenal of truth and power built by the hands of the great holy men of holy times. But who made the many tough old blades which have a temper that outlives time,--whose rugged points have never lost a whit of their keenness, after having torn their way through human bosoms, been hung up and taken down again for centuries, and never a maker's name upon them?