With all those people looking on and my lawn mower hitting a rock or a hole every seven revolutions, I felt cheap. I felt as though it might have been myself whose jawbone was broken by Samson, or who bore Balaam to Jerusalem. The crowd kept growing, and a stream of honest toil rolled down my spine. Somehow or other I finished the job. Then I looked at the crowd. I left the lawn mower and walked over to them with a deadly glare in my eye.
"Any of you fellows want to fight?" I demanded rudely.
"Because if you do," I said, "I can tie both hands behind me and lick any six of you right now."
The crowd melted away slowly. One man did stay a moment, but he didn't want to fight. He offered to feel my pulse.
In spite of his sarcasm, and in the face of all criticism, I insist that I was beginning to learn. For instance, shall I tell you of the time I astonished Campbell?
Campbell was raised in the country. The smell of sod is strong in his nostrils, and he is a handy man with a hoe. Campbell is an agent for the Duke, but time hangs on his hands at moments and he dropped around in a casual sort of way to look at our back yard.
"I'm thinking of planting a turnip and some onions," said my wife pleasantly.
"In that soil," he said, "you'll never make them completely happy. They'll be crying for home all the time."
"What's the matter with the soil?" demanded my wife.
"Well, it wasn't built for farming. You always have to put in richer soil. I'll show you."
My wife thinks Campbell is just about right. When he began to talk about how he'd enjoy fixing her garden, and would she please let him have the hoe, rake, spade, and a bucket to tote sod from a pile in the front yard, she began to look upon him as a Dispensation of Providence. Agriculturally, I dwindled in importance as he expanded.
He cut five rows, or furrows, or ditches, or whatever you call them, with the hoe, and into them he dropped peas, beans, onions, parsley, and parsnips. Then he brought buckets of top soil and dumped it on the seeds along the line, and raked the soil over until it was smooth, and stuck the empty envelopes at the end of the rows for fear my wife would get the peas identified as corn, the beans as peanuts, the onions as cauliflower, the parsley as rhubarb, the parsnips as turnips. Campbell let me bring some more buckets of soil. For that favor I have begun to question the degree of Campbell's kindness.