they not hidden
a good deal about their worm-eaten plums--about their cherries that were
carried off by armies of burglarious birds; about their potatoes that
proved watery and unpalatable; about their melons that fell victims to
their neighbors' fowls; about their peaches that succumbed to the
unexpected raid of Jack Frost; about their grapes that fell under the
blight of mildew; about their green corn that withered in the hill;
about the mighty host of failures that, if all were told, would tower in
high proportion above the few much blazoned successes?

"Who is it that says a garden is a standing source of pleasure? Amend
this, I say, by asserting that a garden is a standing source of
discomfort and vexation ... A hopeless restlessness, according to my
observation, takes possession of every amateur gardener. Discontent
abides in his soul. There is, indeed, so much to be done, changed,
rearranged, watched, nursed, that the amateur gardener is really
entitled to praise and generous congratulations when one of his thousand
schemes comes to fruition. We ought in pity to rejoice with him over his
big Lawton blackberries, and say nothing of the cherries, and the pears,
and the peaches, that once were budding hopes, but have gone the way of
Moore's 'dear gazelle.' Then the large expenditures which were needed to
bring about his triumph of the Lawtons. 'Those potatoes,' said an
enthusiastic amateur gardener to me once, 'cost twenty-five cents
apiece!' And they were very good potatoes, too--almost equal to those
that could be bought in market at a dollar a bushel.

"And then, amateur gardeners are feverishly addicted to early rising.
Men with gardens are like those hard drinkers whose susceptibilities are
hopelessly blunted. Who but a man diverted from the paths of honest
feeling and natural enjoyment, possessed of a demoniac mania, lost to
the peace and serenity of the virtuous and the blessed, could find
pleasure amid the damps, and dews, and chills, and raw-edgedness of a
garden in the early morning, absolutely find pleasure in saturated
trousers, in shoes swathed in moisture, in skies that are gray and
gloomy, in flowers that are, as Mantalini would put it, 'demnition
moist'? The thing is incredible! Now, a garden, after the sun has dried
the paths, warmed the air, absorbed the dew, is admissible. But a
possession that compels an early turning out into fogs and discomforts
deserves for this fact alone the anathema of al