WINTER MEETING AT LEBANON. 297 



subject I don't know but it would be well to mention some of the 

 things nature has done for me in the past season, and will say right 

 here, if there is any one present that hasn't had as much nature as 

 would do him this season, and thinks he will need more than his share, 

 I speak first to let him have all my surplus. 



To start with, last spring nature, by warm and genial smiles, made 

 a regular posey bed of my strawberry patch. Then she turned the 

 cold shoulder and Jack frost stepped in and spread devastation. Na- 

 ture took a weeping spell and saturated the ground for weeks at a 

 stretch, and at the same time spread a veil over the face of the sun and 

 chilled the drowned plants, and put the soil in the very worst possible 

 condition, and when it was just about suitable to make bricks, sure 

 enough, out came the face of the burning sun, and weeks of dry, 

 windy weather, and baked the bricks. Oh yes, nature and I were in. 

 the strawberry patch together quite frequently this summer, so was 

 crab grass and myself; we had it up and down, I may say, until the 

 joints of my anatomy were worn threadbare, as the Irishman would 

 say. Nature sent a hail storm which didn't knock the daylights out of 

 my windows ; oh no, but when the storm was over the daylight could 

 get through the windows easier than it did before. This same deluge 

 of frozen rain knocked the bark off in twenty places on each of the 

 five hundred young apple trees just planted. Nature also three con- 

 secutive times sent a flood, a regular old gully washer, and washed 

 down the branch a young apple tree, just because I set it in a low place 

 in order to square out the corner of my orchard. Three times I fished 

 that poor tree out of the drift-wood and re-set it where it belonged, 

 and it became so that when a dark cloud came up I would grab my 

 shovel and start for that tree, until nature, seeing I was determined, 

 just gave it up, so I thought, and just as I was beginning to feel big 

 over my victory, she sent two weeks of dry weather and a borer, and 

 killed that tree too dead to talk about. 



Nature, no, I mean the agricultural department, sent our society a 

 sack of seeds. 



Now nature had evidently got in its work on most of these seeds 

 previously, but a rare exception was in some Dutch case-knife beans; 

 they did come up and grew finely, and I went four miles to get some in- 

 fant black-jacks to set up for them to cling to. In good time they were 

 heavily loaded, and they were of rich and splendid flavor, so much so 

 I forbade wife cooking any more, having visions of acres of beans and 

 a big bank account. This fall I went out to gather my case-knives, 

 but nature had been there a few days before and put in possession of 

 each of those beans, from ten to twenty liitle black, fat weavels. It 



