212 What We Lose 



man, because he has evidently not kept pace 

 with his fellows in the race. In the Old World 

 the struggle for money and material prosperity 

 has not been so exhausting these last few hun- 

 dred years, and has not excluded spiritual 

 things so completely as with us ; and there we 

 find, in consequence, that the outward signs of 

 the ability to earn money are not deemed so 

 essential to the fixing of a man's standing in 

 the community. To wear a patched coat and 

 to work with one's hands in a garden, do not 

 in themselves stamp a man in France and Eng- 

 land as an inferior person. I was particularly 

 impressed with this when some years ago an 

 English clergyman a man of much culture 

 and reading gave up his cure in a fashionable 

 summer resort not a thousand miles from New 

 York, because he found that his love of work- 

 ing his own garden was looked upon with sur- 

 prise, to use no stronger term, and he was made 

 to feel that his parishioners considered the 

 dignity of their church endangered by their 

 pastor's curious fancy for digging. In Eng- 

 land it had been his custom to raise his own 

 vegetables. Here it was not thought dignified 



