No more time was spent in following an ever-dwindling flock of ducks. Serena and I, with the help of Ned, patched the cover of an old building, treated it with mite-proof whitewash, and with planks and clean straw made nests irresistible to any hen worthy of her keep. For the diddlies, we carried strips from an old sawmill and made coops which we could set about in sunny places. And Len sowed an acre of rye for green winter picking; also a “skiver of wheat” which was to be all Serena’s, as a basis for “feed,” but I suspected that the hens would anticipate that harvest--and they did. In the spring, over at Len’s, a bountiful garden was in the ground early. It had been my onerous but measurably happy custom, if my intermittent journeying permitted, to cultivate a garden for my own needs, the surplus going, as kisses do, by favor, which meant that Serena had her share. But now--could I not buy of _her_? I had derived from my gardens a savory pleasure, superior and cryptic, but with ever-growing rebellion I realized that my method was the method of the spendthrift instead of the canny reckoner. Take, if it please you, the most responsive of plants, lettuce. Consider its history from its origin in a seed catalogue (carefully conned instead of that haunting, unopened book of essays) to its final surrender on your dining-table, gold-white in its depths, and crackling crisp from an earthen jar set in your clear, cold spring. Think, if the nuances of appetite permit, of the digging, the fertilizing, and the pulverizing of the soil, the preparation of new beds for transplanting, the transplanting itself at the time most propitious for the product, however inopportune for you, the guarding against heat, against cold, against drouth, against beating rain, the covering, the uncovering, and the rising early at last to uproot it with the night cool in its heart; all demanding a thousand thoughts and movements before its æsthetic finality can complete your dinner scheme and perish, it may be, under a tooth indifferently devouring mere lettuce. And so with those tender, early limas. So too, and a little more, with that dish of creamed something. And if your nucleus is broiled chicken, as it must often be, the alternative being some form of hog--chicken brought up from the egg under your proprietary eye; if your periphery include blueberries that did not fall of themselves from the ridge on the peak to ennoble your meal; and if the cream is the velvety sequence of a wet and weedy climb to the top of the pasture in pursuit of a thankless cow, pampered from your own corn-crib, that merely lifts her head and watches your stumbling, bedrabbled arrival to the last inch; the thought of being able to “buy from Serena” will be a warm and driving glow in your heart. For such an end I, prudent at last, was willing to forego any mystic succulence to be secured from the participation of this my hand in the birth and growth of my edibles.