Hodge is the fellow who knows the ferns according to the slabs. It is time you should know Hodge by his slab. No such being can yet be found in the United States: your civilisation is too young. Hodge is my British-Empire gardener; and as he now looks out for every birthday much as for any total solar eclipse of the year--with a kind of growing solicitude lest the sun or the birthday should finally, as it passes, bowl him over for good--he announced to me with visible relief the other day that he had successfully passed another total natal eclipse; that he was fifty-eight. But Hodge is not fifty-eight years old. The battle of Hastings was fought in 1066 and Hodge without knowing it was beginning to be a well-grown lout then. For Hodge is English landscape gardening in human shape. He is the benevolent spirit of the English turf, a malign spirit to English weeds. He is wall ivy, a root, a bulb, a rake, a wheelbarrow of spring manure, a pile of autumn leaves, a crocus. In a distant future mythology of our English rural life he will perhaps rank where he belongs--as a luminary next in importance to the sun: a two-legged god be-earthed in old clothes, with a stiff back, a stiff temper, the jaw of the mastiff and the eye of a prophet. It is Hodge who does the slabs. He would not allow anything to come into the garden without mastering that thing. For the sake of his own authority he must subdue as much of the Latin language as invades his territory along with the ferns. But I think nothing comparable to such a struggle against overwhelming odds--Hodge's brain pitted against the Latin names of the ferns--nothing comparable to the dull fury of that onset is to be found in the history of man unless it be England's war on Napoleon for twenty years. England did conquer Napoleon and finally shut him up in a desolate, rocky place; and Hodge has finally conquered the names of the ferns and shut them up in a desolate, rocky place--his skull, his personal promontory. Nowadays you should see him meet me in a garden path when I come down early some morning. You should see him plant himself before me and, taking off his cap and scratching the back of his neck with the back of his muddy thumb, make this announcement: "The _Asplenium filix-faemina_ put up two new shoots last night, sir. Bishop's crooks, I believe you calls 'em, sir." As though I were a farmer and my shepherd should notify me that one of the ewes had dropped twin lambs at three A.M. Hodge's tone implies more yet: the honour of the shoots--a questionable honour--goes to Hodge as their botanical sire!