196 MY GARDEN 



proposed eclipsing all former efforts in his garden 

 during the coming spring. He was going, he said, 

 to advertise the fact that "God is Love" in letters 

 six feet long, composed entirely of early spinach. I 

 praised this thought highly, and declared the idea 

 was worthy of him. The time came, and every eye 

 was turned to the bank whereon the station-master 

 made his annual effort. Presently from the earth 

 began to sprout pale leaves, and day followed day, 

 and the legend grew, yet in no manner suggested the 

 words that we had been led to expect. Finally dastard 

 deeds blazed forth, and a great truth, quite different 

 to that intended, burst from the teeming earth. It 

 was merely this : 



" Jinks is a silly Ass." 



The malice of the act, of course, lay in the vegetable 

 selected, for this crime had been committed with 

 horse-radishes, and by the time that its victim grasped 

 the fact, and set to work madly to grub them up, these 

 coarse herbs had proceeded after their kind, and 

 acquired a grip of the soil that earthquakes might 

 hardly have unsettled. Jinks did all he could ; he 

 pretended to laugh at it, and kept telling people that 

 he had forgotten all about it ; he ploughed the land, 

 and planted it with potatoes ; yet each succeeding 

 spring saw that virulent and malignant stuff struggle 

 up again to scream out, as it were, to every train in 

 the time-table, that Jinks lacked intelligence. His 

 spirit failed at last, and he took his life. He wandered 

 down the line one day at a time when an express 



