TARRYTOWN LETTERS. 



203 



manly tramps will break stones in the streets like 

 good fellows, if given hammer-handles as long and 

 lithe as billiard-cues. Mrs. Tarryer never speaks 

 of woman's " position " — she takes that for granted, 

 in the garden. She has seen the lines of Milton : 



" Him there they found, 

 Squat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve." 



and trains young women to stand like weed-destroy- 

 ing athletes, and work at it as if they were deter- 

 mined goddesses governing the world ! Now and 

 then a girl in her kitchen needed specs to pick over 

 beans nicely ; but when it came to weeding garden 

 Mrs. Tarryer would choose the openest labor for 

 these and have them attended by chivalrous and 

 eagle-eyed champions, who would see that their 

 neighbor's rows were hoed, too. Not till she came 

 to the use of glasses herself, for fine print, was she 

 aware of the grand compensation in the fact that 

 the visual focus of near-sighted persons extends as 

 they grow older, and how by that means matches 

 can be so arranged on earth as to keep keen eye- 

 sight for all distances in the family. 



Literary people, who are only clerks, the same 

 as I am to Mrs. Tarryer, and Plato was to Socrates 

 (the philosophical side of Zantippe), will make a 

 regular muddle of right and wrong, as Plato and 

 the clerks who attempt to follow him make of it, 

 without a woman's counsel. We must be sharp to 

 see how, from the beginning, and always, if any one 

 shows truth in the garden, liars — curiously like 

 "lawyers" already, in common speech — will squat 

 around and deny it. We may have keen tools for 

 weeding, but only the usual proportion of day-light ; 

 and there will continue to be in every family un- 

 developed and over-developed members, who will 

 need to be told what are weeds and how to run them 

 out or force them to change their natures. Gar- 

 dens, with men and women in them, were estab- 

 lished for this business in the first place, and never, 

 as some people suppose, for weeds to flourish. Those 

 are always ccjntraband, no matter what the lawyers 

 say. 



Among Mrs. Tarryer's first studies of weeding- 

 tools for herself, when people were learning to buy 

 instead of making what they want in this country, 

 she had a bayonct-hoe in its rudnnental niodern trade 

 form presented to her by a dealer as 

 an imported article, costing 75 cents at 

 retail, without a handle. It had a socket 

 that wouldn't hold a handle securely, 

 no goose-neck, and a blade that would 

 hold neither edge or point. Made of 

 iron or low steel, by clumsy hammer-smiths, it had 

 the air of reversion from a good thing in the hands 



of generation after generation of mechanics who 

 didn't know or care what they were making it for. 

 Arts are lost when we sequester them from the land 

 they were meant to decorate ; as religions change 

 so their own grandmothers wouldn't know them, 

 when transplanted from the soils and seasons they 

 were meant to serve. The make of iron candle- 

 sticks, fashioned after one of the seven of the altar, 

 still goes on, but their real use now is in pork- 

 factories. Trade tempted from teaching is to 

 blame for these degradations. 



Mrs. Tarryer bothered me a good deal with that 

 bastard bayonet, made so as not to arm the peas- 

 antry. In the course of 25 years she stood over as 

 many blacksmiths, keeping the old trade-sample as 

 a model of how not to do it, until what she calls the 



bayonet -hoe 

 of the re- 

 7iaissance 

 was elabor- 

 ated. This 

 was dupli- 

 cated by the 

 force of one 



of our great corporations — tlie same that made John 

 Brown's pikes for him — in considerable numbers. 

 Since that time it has been waiting for wholesale 

 orders ; and meanwhile the country has been filling 

 up with kentledge of the old clumsy patterns, fit to 

 prevent intelligent women or men either from going 

 into the garden — except " as an example to the chil- 

 dren." 



As an implement of peace the bayonet-hoe must 

 be far older than the bayonet of Bayonne, or than 

 fire-arms, or cross-bows, and as old as any fine im- 

 plements of warfare, for men never learned to 

 fight weeds or weedy mankind really well till they 

 had beautiful gardens to fight for. This new 

 bayonet-hoe, with its graceful goose-neck, throwing 

 the handle so as to work on the central resistance 

 of the blade, which is but the keenest form in steel 

 of a rigid fore-finger ; and furnished with a knob- 

 hilt that is a ball-and-socket joint in the hand, re- 

 lated to the skin of the palm as the pulley is to the 

 belt ; is, altogether, when thoroughly wrought in 

 two sizes, the perfection of hand-weeding tools for 

 all work. It is fit for the most delicate touches next 

 to plants in the seed-bed, and for deep digging and 

 uprooting there is nothing that can be applied so 

 effectively and rapidly with so little power. 



For the heaviest work, Mrs. Tarryer believes in 

 men to a certain extent. I've seen her pile three or 

 four of her hoes, such as he had never seen before, 

 on the shoulder of a new hired man, meeting his 



