86 MY SUMMER IN A GARI 



of an unregulated life. I put up the most at- 

 tractive 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 strag- 

 gled off into the air in a wanton manner ; but 

 more than half of them went galivanting 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 nature. And the grape is 

 morally no better. I think the ancients, who 

 were not troubled with the recondite mystery of 

 protoplasm, were right in the mythic union of 

 Bacchus and Venus. 



