96 GARDENING WITH BRAINS * 



no dogs. Mrs. Julian Hawthorne once told me 

 at Redding how she had invited her friends to 

 share with her next day a delicious crop of 

 young pod beans. During the night a wood- 

 chuck epicure ate them all up. 



That crows are epicures they prove by pulling 

 up the corn just after it has sprouted. Do they 

 know what Chinese cooks knew long ago (while 

 we have just found it out), that by sprouting 

 grains before we eat them we greatly increase 

 the amount of precious food salts in them? 

 Maybe; but all the same I don't sympathize 

 with crows. Once they dug up a whole row of 

 my earliest Golden Bantam corn. I set a crow 

 trap and caught Silverheels! Toward morning 

 I heard feline cries of distress. I got up and 

 found our pet pussy in the trap, fortunately not 

 badly hurt. 



Gardeners really ought not to have cats, for 

 birds eat thousands of injurious insect pests 

 and a country cat devours two hundred birds 

 a year! To be sure, cats also eat field mice and 

 the very injurious moles. 



Silverheels was more like a dog than like a 

 cat. Nearly every day he accompanied us on 

 our walk in the woods. He meowed woefully if 

 we went too far; on the way home he was con- 

 tentedly silent. He and the collie were great 

 chums; Laddie even let pussy eat out of his 

 plate. Both were epicures, too; when we were 

 eating, they sat on their hind legs, eagerly 



