CROPS AND PROFITS. 159 



dew-berries, huckleberries, wild raspberries, bill- 

 berries, and choke-cherries ; and in autumn, gather 

 bouquets of Golden-rod and Asters, set off with crim 

 son tufts of Sumac, and the scarlet of maple boughs. 

 And when I see the brilliancy of these, and smack 

 the delicate flavor of the wild-fruit, it makes me 

 doubt if our progress is, after all, as grand as it 

 should be, or as we vainly believe it to be ; and (to 

 renew ray parallel) it seems to me that the old-time 

 and gone-by thinkers may possibly have given us as 

 piquant, and marrowy suggestions upon whatever 

 subject of human knowledge they touched, as the 

 hot-house philosophers of to-day. I never open, of a 

 Sunday afternoon, upon the yellowed pages of 

 Jeremy Taylor, but his flavor and affluence, and 

 homely wealth of allusions, suggest the tangled wild 

 of the garden with its starry flowers, its piquant 

 berries, its scorn of human rulings, its unkempt vig 

 or, its boughs and tendrils stretching heaven-ward; 

 and I never water a reluctant hill of yellowed 

 cucumbers, and coax it with all manner of concen 

 trated fertilizers into bearing, but I think of the 



elegant education of the dapper Dr. , and of 



the sappy, and flavorless results. 



To the westward of the garden, and concealing a 

 decrepit mossy wall, that is covered with blackberry 

 vines and creepers, is the flanking shelter of another 



