prevailed. I determined that the weeds should not sleep on the
field of battle. I routed them out, and leveled their works. I am master
of the situation. If I have made a desert, I at least have peace; but
it is not quite a desert. The strawberries, the raspberries, the celery,
the turnips, wave green above the clean earth, with no enemy in sight.
In these golden October days no work is more fascinating than this
getting ready for spring. The sun is no longer a burning enemy, but a
friend, illuminating all the open space, and warming the mellow soil.
And the pruning and clearing away of rubbish, and the fertilizing, go on
with something of the hilarity of a wake, rather than the despondency of
other funerals. When the wind begins to come out of the northwest of set
purpose, and to sweep the ground with low and searching fierceness, very
different from the roistering, jolly bluster of early fall, I have put
the strawberries under their coverlet of leaves, pruned the grape-vines
and laid them under the soil, tied up the tender plants, given the fruit
trees a good, solid meal about the roots; and so I turn away, writing
Resurgam on the gatepost. And Calvin, aware that the summer is past and
the harvest is ended, and that a mouse in the kitchen is worth two birds
gone south, scampers away to the house with his tail in the air.

And yet I am not perfectly at rest in my mind. I know that this is only
a truce until the parties recover their exhausted energies. All winter
long the forces of chemistry will be mustering under ground, repairing
the losses, calling up the reserves, getting new strength from my
surface-fertilizing bounty, and making ready for the spring campaign.
They will open it before I am ready: while the snow is scarcely melted,
and the ground is not passable, they will begin to move on my works; and
the fight will commence. Yet how deceitfully it will open to the music
of birds and the soft enchantment of the spring mornings! I shall even
be permitted to win a few skirmishes: the secret forces will even wait
for me to plant and sow, and show my full hand, before they come on in
heavy and determined assault. There are already signs of an internecine
fight with the devil-grass, which has intrenched itself in a
considerable portion of my garden-patch. It contests the ground inch by
inch; and digging it out is very much such labor as eating a piece of
choke-cherry pie with the stones all in. It is work, too, that I