bittered. That lane with its
occasional passers-by did much to wreck the intensive scheme, because my
father always stopped work and went indoors if any one watched him.
His special manure was apt to arouse a troublesome spirit of inquiry in
hardy natures.

In digging his rows and shaping his patches he neglected the guiding
string and trusted to his eye altogether too much, and the consequent
obliquity and the various wind-breaks and scare-crows he erected, and
particularly an irrigation contrivance he began and never finished by
which everything was to be watered at once by means of pieces of gutter
from the roof and outhouses of Number 2, and a large and particularly
obstinate clump of elder-bushes in the abolished hedge that he had
failed to destroy entirely either by axe or by fire, combined to give
the gardens under intensive culture a singularly desolate and disorderly
appearance. He took steps towards the diversion of our house drain under
the influence of the Sewage Utilisation Society; but happily he stopped
in time. He hardly completed any of the operations he began; something
else became more urgent or simply he tired; a considerable area of the
Number 2 territory was never even dug up.

In the end the affair irritated him beyond endurance. Never was a man
less horticulturally-minded. The clamour of these vegetables he had
launched into the world for his service and assistance, wore out his
patience. He would walk into the garden the happiest of men after a
day or so of disregard, talking to me of history perhaps or social
organisation, or summarising some book he had read. He talked to me
of anything that interested him, regardless of my limitations. Then he
would begin to note the growth of the weeds. "This won't do," he would
say and pull up a handful.

More weeding would follow and the talk would become fragmentary. His
hands would become earthy, his nails black, weeds would snap off in
his careless grip, leaving the roots behind. The world would darken.
He would look at his fingers with disgusted astonishment. "CURSE these
weeds!" he would say from his heart. His discourse was at an end.

I have memories, too, of his sudden unexpected charges into the
tranquillity of the house, his hands and clothes intensively enriched.
He would come in like a whirlwind. "This damned stuff all over me and
the Agricultural Chemistry Class at six! Bah! AAAAAAH!"

My mother would never learn not to attempt to break h