THE DESERT AND THE ROSE 21 



no, the Tenderfoot has it all to learn. From the out- 

 set of my ranching career I have cherished two 

 quite inconspicuous virtues: first, I do know what 

 I don't know, and thus protected hasten to sit at the 

 feet of some accredited Gamaliel: second, I have 

 cultivated the habit of close observation while ap- 

 pearing to observe nothing. The individual whose 

 agricultural belongings, animate and inanimate, are 

 in sorry plight may talk "all he has a mind to" with- 

 out affecting me in the faintest degree. By his fruits 

 do I know him — or her. For information, there- 

 fore, I hied me to those who had made good in the 

 departments wherein I needed counsel, and the 

 empty chatter of the failures beat on my ears as the 

 crackling of thorns under a pot. 



Some eager advisers remind me of a man I 

 stumbled on not long since in a city garden. He 

 was telling the lady of the garden how to tend her 

 flowers and while thus engaged was permitting a 

 full head of water from the hose to drown her 

 delicate seedlings. So is it well to take note of the 

 ranchman offering counsel, to mark well his ways 

 and what manner of man he be. 



Some of the most helpful advice I ever received 

 was given me by a woman who even in "bad years" 

 never failed to make her ranch pay. She was too 

 busily engaged in working to make it pay to join the 

 "curb-warmers" on the street. 



For reasons, then, alleged earlier I stood calm and 

 unafraid whilst, during the setting out of a peach 

 orchard, a neighbor notoriously unsuccessful drew 

 rein at my fence more than once for the purpose of 



