Bailey, James Montgomery . They All Do It; or, Mr. Miggs of Danbury and his Neighbors Being a Faithful Record of What Befell the Miggses on Several Important Occasions ...
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MAKING THE GARDEN.

    WE suppose there is a time that comes to every man when he feels he should like to have a garden. If he takes such a notion, he will tell his wife of it. This is the first mistake he makes; and the ground thus lost is never fully recovered. She


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draws her chair up to his, and lays one hand on his knee, and purses up her lips into a whistle of expectation, -- the vixen! -- and tells about her mother's garden, and how nice it is to have vegetables fresh from the vines every morning; and she will go right out and plan the whole thing herself. And so she does. He takes his spade, and works himself into a perspiration; and she tramps around under a frightful sun-bonnet, and gets under his feet, and shrieks at the worms, and loses her shoe, and makes him, first vexed, and then mad, and then ferocious. After the garden is spaded, he gets the seed, and finds she has been thoughtful enough to open the papers, and empty thirteen varieties of different vegetables into one dish. This leads him to step out doors, where he communes with Nature alone for a moment. Then he takes up the seed, and a hoe, and a line, and two pegs, and starts for the garden. And then she puts on that awful bonnet, and brings up the rear with a long-handled rake, and a pocketful of beans, and petunia-seed, and dahlia-bulbs. While he is planting the corn, she stands on the cucumber-hills and rakes over the seed-pan. Then she puts the rake-handle over her shoulder, and the rake-teeth into his hair, and walks over the other beds. He don't find the squash-seed until she moves; and then he digs them out of the earth with his thumb. She plants the beet-seed herself, putting about two


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feet of earth and sod upon them. Then she takes advantage of his absorption in other matters, and puts down the petunia-seed in one spot; and afterwards digs them up, and puts them down in another place. The beans she conceals in the earth wherever she can find a place, and puts the bulbs in the cucumber-hills. Then she tips over the seed-pan again, and apologizes; and steps on two of the best tomato-plants, and says, "Oh my!" which in no way resembles what he says. About this time she discovers a better place for the petunia-seed; but, having forgotten where she last put them, she proceeds to find them, and, within an incredibly brief space of time, succeeds in unearthing pretty much every thing that has been put down. After confusing things so there is no earthly possibility of ever unravelling them again, she says the sun is killing her, and goes over to the fence, where she stands four hours, telling the woman next door about an aunt of hers who was confined to her bed for eleven years, and had eight doctors from the city; but nothing would give her any relief until an old lady -- But you have heard it before. The next day a man comes to his office to get the pay for a patent seed-sower which his wife has ordered; and he no more than gets away, before the patentee of a new lawn-mower comes in with an order for ten dollars; and he, in turn, is followed by the corn-sheller man; and the miserable gardener


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starts for home to head off the robbers, and finds his wife at the gate with his own hat on, and just about to close a bargain with a smooth-faced individual for a two-hundred-dollar mowing-machine, and a pearl-handled, ivory-mounted hay-cutter. He first knocks the agricultural implement agent on the head, and then drags the miserable woman into the house, and, locking the door, gives himself up to his emotions.