By the time I had recovered the garden seemed to melt away into thin air. My neighbor had it all his own way, and while his proud hollyhocks and Johnny-jump-ups reared their heads to drink the mountain water at the twilight hour, my little, low-necked, summer squashes curled up and died. Most every year yet I made a garden. I pay a man $3 to plow it. Then I pay $7.50 for garden seeds and in July I hire the same man at $3 to summer-fallow the whole thing while I go and buy my vegetables of a Chinaman named Wun Lung. I've done this now for eight years, and I owe my robust health and rich olive complexion to the fact that I've got a garden and do just as little in it as possible. Parties desiring a dozen or more of my Shanghai egg-plants to set under an ordinary domestic hen can procure the same by writing to me and enclosing lock of hair and $10. WRITTEN TO THE BOY Asheville, N. C., Feb. 10,1887. |MY DEAR HENRY: Your last issue of the _Retina_, your new thought vehicle, published at New Belony, this state, was received yesterday. I like this number, I think, better than I did the first. While the news in it seems fresher, the editorial assertions are not so fresh. You do not state that you "have come to stay" this week, but I infer that you occupy the same position you did last week with inference to that. I was more especially interested in your piece about how to rear children and the care of parents. I read it to your mother last night while she was setting her bread. Nothing tickles me very often at my time of life, and when I laugh a loud peal of laughter at anything nowadays it's got to be a pretty blamed good thing, I can tell you that. But your piece about bringing up children made me laugh real hard. I enjoy a piece like that from the pen of a juicy young brain like yours. It almost made me young again to read the words of my journalistic gosling son. You also say that "teething is the most trying time for parents." Do you mean that parents are more fretful when they are teething than any other time? Your mother and me reckoned that you must mean that. If so, it shows your great research. How a mere child hardly out of knee-panties, a young shoot like you, who was never a parent for a moment in his life, can enter into and understand the woes that beset parents is more than I can understand. If you had been through what I have while teething I could see how you might understand and write about it, but at present I do not see through it. The first teeth I cut as a parent made me very restless. I was sick two years ago with a new disease that was just out and the doctor gave me something for it that made my teeth fall like the leaves of autumn. In six weeks after I began to convalesce my mouth was perfectly bald-headed. For days I didn't bite into a Ben Davis apple that I didn't leave a fang into it.