Though, to be sure, I had this consolation--I wasn’t the only sufferer, for not one of the neighbours could do a bit better than I did--no, not even poor Mr. S--mm--ns, and he tried hard enough, goodness gracious knows! I declare he used to be out in the broiling hot sun all day, digging away in his shirt sleeves, until his poor bald-head used to look like the top of a beef-steak pudding--and, what for, I should like to know? just to raise, in the course of the year, as many radishes, and cauliflowers, and greens, and rhubard, as he might buy any fine morning in Covent Garden market for a mere sixpence, or a shilling at most. Though he tried his hardest to force a cucumber or two, under a broken ground-glass lamp shade, and spent a little fortune in manure, still the only one that came, of course, was nipped in the gherkin; and, notwithstanding some of his beds were covered with old tumblers, just for all the world like a sideboard, yet I’m sure I never could see the good of them, for his crop of lettuces wouldn’t have made more than one good-sized salad after all; while the gooseberry and currant bushes, that he went to the expense of having put all round his garden, never bore more than a pie and a small pudding in the best of seasons--and that not till the middle of November. In fact, I’ve made up my opinion long ago, that gardening in the suburbs of London is a wicked and wilful waste of time and money. Really and truly the whole atmosphere of the place is so dreadfully smokey, that, without joking, one might just as well try to rear cauliflowers all round the top of a steam-boat funnel, as to think of getting one’s vegetables out of a metropolitan hop-skip-and-a-jump kitchen garden. Vegetables for the family, indeed! “chickweed and groundsel for fine singing birds,” more likely.