not undertake
with a vegetable of tone.

The lettuce is to me a most interesting study. Lettuce is like
conversation: it must be fresh and crisp, so sparkling that you scarcely
notice the bitter in it. Lettuce, like most talkers, is, however, apt to
run rapidly to seed. Blessed is that sort which comes to a head, and so
remains, like a few people I know; growing more solid and satisfactory
and tender at the same time, and whiter at the center, and crisp in
their maturity. Lettuce, like conversation, requires a good deal of oil
to avoid friction, and keep the company smooth; a pinch of attic salt; a
dash of pepper; a quantity of mustard and vinegar, by all means, but so
mixed that you will notice no sharp contrasts; and a trifle of sugar.
You can put anything, and the more things the better, into salad, as
into a conversation; but everything depends upon the skill of mixing. I
feel that I am in the best society when I am with lettuce. It is in the
select circle of vegetables. The tomato appears well on the table; but
you do not want to ask its origin. It is a most agreeable parvenu. Of
course, I have said nothing about the berries. They live in another and
more ideal region; except, perhaps, the currant. Here we see, that,
even among berries, there are degrees of breeding. The currant is well
enough, clear as truth, and exquisite in color; but I ask you to notice
how far it is from the exclusive hauteur of the aristocratic strawberry,
and the native refinement of the quietly elegant raspberry.

I do not know that chemistry, searching for protoplasm, is able to
discover the tendency of vegetables. It can only be found out by outward
observation. I confess that I am suspicious of the bean, for instance.
There are signs in it of an unregulated life. I put up the most
attractive sort of poles for my Limas. They stand high and straight,
like church-spires, in my theological garden,--lifted up; and some of
them have even budded, like Aaron's rod. No church-steeple in a
New England village was ever better fitted to draw to it the rising
generation on Sunday, than those poles to lift up my beans towards
heaven. Some of them did run up the sticks seven feet, and then
straggled off into the air in a wanton manner; but more than half of
them went gallivanting off to the neighboring grape-trellis, and wound
their tendrils with the tendrils of the grape, with a disregard of the
proprieties of life which is a satire upon human natur