332 SUCCESS WITH SMALL FRUITS. 



warned, he will extirpate them utterly. It rarely happens that 

 you can teach this type of man better things. The leopard 

 may change his spots and the Ethiopian his skin, but this 

 man — though resembling both outwardly, through his un- 

 cleanliness — never changes. His blunders, garrulity, and 

 brainless labor, however, would transform Izaak Walton 

 himself into a dragon of irritability. The effort to reform 

 such a man would be heroic, indeed, but let those who enter 

 upon such a .task give their whole souls to it, and not at- 

 tempt gardening at the same time, — unless the garden is 

 maintained for the sake of the man, and they, in their 

 zeal, approach Titania in her midsummer-night's madness, 

 when she bade her attendant fairies to ^' feed " the " trans- 

 lated " weaver — 



" With apricocks and dewberries, 

 With purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries." 



This degenerate descendant of Bottom, however, needs no 

 such considerate attention ; he will help himself to the 

 choicest and rarest. 



Scarcely better than the type portrayed above is the delib- 

 erate workman, who can soon show you how easy it is to 

 spend two dollars in order to make one. His wages — the 

 one thing he is prompt about — will leave little margin of 

 profit on the berries that he has packed, although, by reason of 

 his ancient pipe, they may outrank all the fruit in the mar- 

 ket. This man never walks nor nms, no matter how great 

 the emergency and press of work ; he merely jogs around, 

 and picks a raspberry as he would pry out a bowlder. He does 

 his work fairly w^ell, usually ; but the fact that it would re- 

 quire a hundred such men to care for a small place causes 

 not the slightest solicitude. He would smoke just as stolidly 

 and complacently after bringing wreck and ruin to a dozen 

 employers. 



