204 



TAR R y TOWN LETTERS. 



puzzled look by telling him to " go out in the garden, 

 but see that you don't do any mischief till I come." 

 Within a week that man would be explaining to 

 some acquaintance that he could do four times more 

 business in a day with those hoes, among all sorts 

 of crops, than with any tools he ever saw. But we 

 change man's religion if we give him new tools — 

 hence we are very cautious, and keep buying the old 

 things that incline us to hope for some better word 

 than this. 



"Come, girls!" Mrs. Tarryfer would say some 

 cool morning after breakfast, " it is a good day for 

 Rumex* and Repeiis !* Take an extra hoe or two 

 along with you for company !" So she would " give 

 the bayonet" to the creeping-roots of the plants 

 mentioned, marching over 12 or 15 acres of garden, 

 in a way said roots would not forget for weeks. 

 Her days of judgment for weeds came often and 

 were followed to extermination. 



When Mrs. Tarryer found the salf-same bayonet, 

 in effect, that she had wrought so faithfully by 

 twenty-five years' practice, in Loudon's "Agricul- 

 ture" or "Gardening," she was delighted. She 

 greatly prefers to have decrepit old book authority 

 on her side, whenever it happens to know enough. 



This was Lord Jl'mon's or 

 the Spanish pattern. That 

 origin would take us among 

 the exquisite Moorish arti- 

 sans, who inherited the 

 crafts of the Orient, so that 

 we may reasonably presume 

 the mountain green Amytis 

 of Babylon, who would have her garden set up 

 where she could air herself, had nearly as good 

 bayonet -hoes as Mrs. Tarryer's. She was as 

 pleased with the finding in Loudon, as by Dr. War- 

 ren's showing in " Paradise Found" that Homer 

 knew the world was round rather better on the 

 average than we do. 



Loudon wrote "for his keep, "they say, and must 

 have been kept rather short by his publishers and 



readers, or he would have handed the bayonet-hoe 

 down to us in better working shape. This is one 

 of his ancient emble7ns^ a blasted bud 

 of British handicraft, and the same 

 thing has been repeated in stupid 

 American manufacture — the progeny 

 of Yankee book-worms crossed with 

 the abortive imaginations of mechanics who never 

 had a decent garden. 



Another of Mrs. Tarryer's recreations appeared in 

 Loudon in this shape seventy-five years ago. It is 

 evidently intended as 2. plantain weeder, 

 copied and degraded by dim art, work- 

 ing for generations with uncertain ham- 

 mer and pencil. Mrs. Tarryer hails 

 The American Garden to the revival of 

 these beneficent antiquities. Years ago 

 she had the same conception in far more perfect 

 form for weeding grass-plats and door-yards, and as 

 a lawn-weedcr. One time I had forty acres of old pas- 

 ture under treatment, 

 when it sprang thick 

 with mulleins and the 

 neighbors were laugh- 

 ing at us. But she set 

 me to cutting old hoes 

 down to the above pat- 

 tern, and one day in May when it rained so it 

 wouldn't do to have creatures out, she borrowed 

 seven umbrellas and packed eight or nine of us off 

 bare-foot and with trousers rolled up to cut those 

 mulleins. The state in which Mrs. Tarryer per- 

 formed this exploit is reckoned by the census to con- 

 tain so few "women engaged in agriculture," that 

 no doubt she was the only one counted. Mrs. Tar- 

 ryer thinks the next census will find more women 

 in the garden. 



Not much can be done about these things till 

 trade and manufactures get clearer views from an 

 indignant public of the art of hand-weeding. Yet 

 we can at least refuse to buy the hoes that have no 

 socket to hold a decent handle. 



*Sorrel and " grows-through-potatoes grass " — Ed. 



