66 WITH EARTH AND SKY 
critters are to be tabooed in a garden. They 
divest it of fertility. The chicken is to be looked 
on in the nature of a potato bug. The potato 
and the bug cannot thrive simultaneously, hence 
all expert gardeners promptly kill the potato bug 
and not the potato. If the bug were not taught 
that it was mortal, the potato would succumb to 
mortality. We kill the bug in the interest of the 
potato, for gardening is not the fine art of raising 
bugs: it is the fine art of raising potatoes and 
such like edibles. To fail to kill the bug is treason 
to the potato: and gardeners must not be traitors, 
hence killing the bug is right and our bounden 
duty. By this irrefutable logic the neighbor’s 
chicken is a bug and must be killed. So it will 
happen that the chicken will not trouble for long. 
He must be eliminated in the interest of the garden 
sass which may be said to own the garden. 
Now, by all these logical paths we are led to 
the same conclusion, to the elimination, i. e., 
the hoeing down of the neighbor’s chicken. He 
is a weed, a bug, a hostile, and to undo him is 
due him and due the garden. A severely logical 
faculty is thus seen to be a fine gardener asset. 
This may account for my own success in this 
field of learning. 
A certain learned journal once upon a time was 
stimulated by my vaticinations on gardening to 
enter editorial demurrer. It was well done. 
That is, what was done, was as well done as a 
poor thing could be. The point made by the 
