When one gets almost weary of the struggle,
she is as fresh as at the beginning,--just, in fact, ready for the
fray. I, for my part, begin to appreciate the value of frost and
snow; for they give the husbandman a little peace, and enable him,
for a season, to contemplate his incessant foe subdued. I do not
wonder that the tropical people, where Nature never goes to sleep,
give it up, and sit in lazy acquiescence.
Here I have been working all the season to make a piece of lawn. It
had to be graded and sowed and rolled; and I have been shaving it
like a barber. When it was soft, everything had a tendency to go on
to it,--cows, and especially wandering hackmen. Hackmen (who are a
product of civilization) know a lawn when they see it. They rather
have a fancy for it, and always try to drive so as to cut the sharp
borders of it, and leave the marks of their wheels in deep ruts of
cut-up, ruined turf. The other morning, I had just been running the
mower over the lawn, and stood regarding its smoothness, when I
noticed one, two, three puffs of fresh earth in it; and, hastening
thither, I found that the mole had arrived to complete the work of
the hackmen. In a half-hour he had rooted up the ground like a pig.
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