one need trouble himself
to ascertain whether "farmer" stood for a close-fisted, narrow-souled
clodhopper, or the smiling, benevolent master of broad acres. Farmer
means both these, I could have chosen the meaning I liked, and it is not
probable that any troublesome facts would have floated down the years to
intercept any theory I might have launched. I would rather he had been
a shoemaker; it would have been so easy to transform him, after his
lamented decease, into a shoe-manufacturer,--and shoe-manufacturers, we
all know, are highly respectable people, often become great men, and
get sent to Congress. An apothecary might have figured as an M.D.
A greengrocer might have been apotheosized into a merchant. A
dancing-master would flourish on the family-records as a professor of
the Terpsichorean art. A taker of daguerreotype portraits would never
be recognized in "my great-grandfather _the artist_." But a barber is
unmitigated and immitigable. It cannot be shaded off nor toned down
nor brushed up. Besides, was greatness ever allied to barbarity?
Shakspeare's father was a wool-driver, Tillotson's a clothier, Barrow's
a linen-draper, Defoe's a butcher, Milton's a scrivener, Richardson's a
joiner, Burns's a farmer; but did any one ever hear of a barber's
having remarkable children? I must say, with all deference to my
great-grandfather, that I do wish he would have been considerate enough
of his descendants' feelings to have been born in the old days when
barbers and doctors were one, or else have chosen some other occupation
than barbering. Barber he did, however; in this very box he kept his
wigs, and, painful as it was to have continually before my eyes this
perpetual reminder of plebeian great-grand-paternity, I consented to it
rather than lose my seeds. Then I folded my hands in sweet, though calm
satisfaction. I had proved myself equal to the emergency, and that
always diffuses a glow of genial complacency through the soul. I had
outwitted Halicarnassus. Exultation number two. He had designed to cheat
me out of my garden by a story about land, and here was my garden ready
to burst forth into blossom under my eyes. He said little, but I knew
he felt deeply. I caught him one day looking out at my window with
corroding envy in every lineament. "You might have got some dust out of
the road; it would have been nearer." That was all he said. Even that
little I did not fully understand.

I watched, and waited, and watered, i