第12章

A good-sized, well-managed festival ought to produce nets enough to cover my entire beds; and I can think of no other method of preserving the berries from the birds next year.I wonder how many strawberries it would need for a festival "and whether they would cost more than the nets.

I am more and more impressed, as the summer goes on, with the inequality of man's fight with Nature; especially in a civilized state.In savagery, it does not much matter; for one does not take a square hold, and put out his strength, but rather accommodates himself to the situation, and takes what he can get, without raising any dust, or putting himself into everlasting opposition.But the minute he begins to clear a spot larger than he needs to sleep in for a night, and to try to have his own way in the least, Nature is at once up, and vigilant, and contests him at every step with all her ingenuity and unwearied vigor.This talk of subduing Nature is pretty much nonsense.I do not intend to surrender in the midst of the summer campaign, yet I cannot but think how much more peaceful my relations would now be with the primal forces, if I had, let Nature make the garden according to her own notion.(This is written with the thermometer at ninety degrees, and the weeds starting up with a freshness and vigor, as if they had just thought of it for the first time, and had not been cut down and dragged out every other day since the snow went off.)We have got down the forests, and exterminated savage beasts; but Nature is no more subdued than before: she only changes her tactics,--uses smaller guns, so to speak.She reenforces herself with a variety of bugs, worms, and vermin, and weeds, unknown to the savage state, in order to make war upon the things of our planting; and calls in the fowls of the air, just as we think the battle is won, to snatch away the booty.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 Inoticed 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.

I found his run-ways.I waited for him with a spade.He did not appear; but, the next time I passed by, he had ridged the ground in all directions,--a smooth, beautiful animal, with fur like silk, if you could only catch him.He appears to enjoy the lawn as much as the hackmen did.He does not care how smooth it is.He is constantly mining, and ridging it up.I am not sure but he could be countermined.I have half a mind to put powder in here and there, and blow the whole thing into the air.Some folks set traps for the mole; but my moles never seem to go twice in the same place.I am not sure but it would bother them to sow the lawn with interlacing snake-grass (the botanical name of which, somebody writes me, is devil-grass: the first time I have heard that the Devil has a botanical name), which would worry them, if it is as difficult for them to get through it as it is for me.

I do not speak of this mole in any tone of complaint.He is only a part of the untiring resources which Nature brings against the humble gardener.I desire to write nothing against him which I should wish to recall at the last,--nothing foreign to the spirit of that beautiful saying of the dying boy, " He had no copy-book, which, dying, he was sorry he had blotted."