My Ambition Grows 29 
of rocks, soil and weeds; and as a guarantee that this is a real, 
and not a fancy sketch, the lady’s hand, that makes but a 
pleasant mockery of toil, is pictured gently extended, clothed 
to the elbow with her stout leathern gauntlet—as I recall 
mine, they were mostly either in the barn or sunning them- 
selves on a distant rock—and in her hand is something that 
looks like a composite growth of 
all the garden, thus proving that 
feminine labor lightly pursued 
is productive. And the Lady’s 
wheelbarrow, duly portrayed on 
the next page, is the triggest, nat- 
tiest little toy ever offered for sale. 
Then the author tells you the 
angle at which to thrust in your spade, how to use your 
strength, how to raise the earth on the spade—all of 
which she says “may be done with ease.” She evidently 
measures the human chain by its weakest link, and after 
saying that “so few ladies are strong enough to throw 
earth from a heap,” she tells how the feeble can make a 
profitable compromise, and achieve the same results by a 
strategic use of her tools. I do not know what would have 
happened if I had used these dainty super-refined methods. 
It took brawn and pluck and plenty of it to prepare my land. 
In vain do I scan my authority for some hints regarding how a 
lady should act when she strikes among the et ceteras a rock 
several feet across, or finds her garden line escaping from the 
“soil under long cultivation” and making straight for a slope 
that has not been tilled since the nebular period of our globe. 
What sort of a compromise shall she make with her shovel so 
that the increasing pile of earth, dug out of an ever rising and 
extending bank, shall deposit itself on the further side of a ter- 
race wall; and is the lady’s wall to be made by sundry stones 
