en it, then?"

"No"--still absorbed in my reading.

"What is it you are so interested in?" she inquired, laying down the
new magazine.

"A seed catalogue."

"More seed catalogues! Why, you read nothing else last night."

"But this is a new one," I replied, "and I declare I never saw turnips
that could touch this improved strain here. I am going to plant a lot
of them this year."

"How many seed catalogues have you had this spring?"

"Only six, so far."

"And you plant your earliest seeds--"

"In April, the middle of April, though I may be able to get my first
peas in by the last of March. You see peas"--she was backing
away--"this new Antarctic Pea--will stand a lot of cold; but beans--do
come here, and look at these Improved Kentucky Wonder Pole Beans!"
holding out the wonderfully lithographed page toward her. But she
backed still farther away, and, putting her hands behind her, looked at
me instead, and very solemnly.

I suppose every man comes to know that unaccountable expression in his
wife's eyes soon or late: a sad, baffled expression, detached, remote,
as of things seen darkly, or descried afar off; an expression which
leaves you feeling that you are afar off,--discernible, but infinitely
dwindled. Two minds with but a single thought--so you start; but soon
she finds, or late, that as the heavens are high above the earth, so
are some of your thoughts above her thoughts. She cannot follow. On
the brink she stands and sees you, through the starry spaces, drift
from her ken in your fleet of--seed catalogues.

I have never been able to explain to her the seed catalogue. She is as
fond of vegetables as I, and neither of us cares much for turnips--nor
for carrots, nor parsnips either, when it comes to that, our two hearts
at the table beating happily as one. Born in the country, she
inherited a love of the garden, but a feminine garden, the garden
_parvus, minor, minimus_--so many cut-worms long, so many cut-worms
wide. I love a garden of size, a garden that one cut-worm cannot sweep
down upon in the night.

For years I have wanted to be a farmer, but there in the furrow ahead
of me, like a bird on its nest, she has sat with her knitting; and when
I speak of loving long rows to hoe, she smiles and says, "For the
_boys_ to hoe." Her unit of garden measure is a meal--so many beet
seeds for a meal; so many meals for a row, with never two rows of
anything, with hardly a full-length row of anythi