50 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. 



scratching it, up and down, shallow enough to 

 insure a seed-time by having a dry surface two 

 inches deep, leaving the furrow, and about a yard 

 on each side of it, as the perpetual channel or bed 

 for water or ice in the winter, and baked sterility 

 in the summer ; that if any body dares to mention 

 to you any thing about that mysterious abomination 

 called THE SUBSOIL, you are to screw up your mouth, 

 shake your head, and say, 



"It won't do to bring up that nasty stuff! " 



"But don't Gardeners do it sometimes?" I one 

 day ventured to ask, with childlike simplicity, in 

 reply to the established doctrine. 



"That's a different thing: Gardeners are n't 'prac- 

 tical farmers.' " 



"But don't the roots of plants grow DOWNWARD 

 in a Field, as well as in a Garden?" 



I don't know how it was, but that provoking 

 question always brought the conversation to an 

 abrupt close. I never could get beyond it. It 

 stuck in my own throat and every body's else, 

 like Macbeth's Amen. Left alone at last to my 

 own ignorance, I dropped deeper and deeper, day 

 after day, into a state of confirmed Theory, and was 

 given up by all the Agricultural Faculty. I got 

 strange notions into my head, that, as two negatives 



