. I don't mean to say that each and every one of us
actually left the city. But we all "went forth" in the metaphorical
sense. Some of the men cultivated back gardens; others took vacant lots;
some went out into the suburbs; and others, like myself, went right out
into the country.

We are now back. Each of us has with him his Paris Green, his hoe and
the rest of his radish seed.

The time has, therefore, come for a plain, clear statement of our
experience. We have, as everybody knows, failed. We have been beaten
hack all along the line. Our potatoes are buried in a jungle of autumn
burdocks. Our radishes stand seven feet high, uneatable. Our tomatoes,
when last seen, were greener than they were at the beginning of August,
and getting greener every week. Our celery looked as delicate as a
maidenhair fern. Our Indian corn was nine feet high with a tall feathery
spike on top of that, but no sign of anything eatable about it from top
to bottom.

I look back with a sigh of regret at those bright, early days in April
when we were all buying hoes, and talking soil and waiting for the snow
to be off the ground. The street cars, as we went up and down to
our offices, were a busy babel of garden talk. There was a sort of
farmer-like geniality in the air. One spoke freely to strangers. Every
man with a hoe was a friend. Men chewed straws in their offices, and
kept looking out of windows to pretend to themselves that they were
afraid it might blow up rain. "Got your tomatoes in?" one man would ask
another as they went up in the elevator. "Yes, I got mine in yesterday,"
the other would answer, "But I'm just a little afraid that this east
wind may blow up a little frost. What we need now is growing weather."
And the two men would drift off together from the elevator door along
the corridor, their heads together in friendly colloquy.

I have always regarded a lawyer as a man without a soul. There is one
who lives next door to me to whom I have not spoken in five years. Yet
when I saw him one day last spring heading for the suburbs in a pair of
old trousers with a hoe in one hand and a box of celery plants in the
other I felt that I loved the man. I used to think that stock-brokers
were mere sordid calculating machines. Now that I have seen whole firms
of them busy at the hoe, wearing old trousers that reached to their
armpits and were tied about the waist with a polka dot necktie, I know
that they are men. I know that there are w