"Well," thought I, "I'll do it--as soon as the orchard is finished." As soon as the orchard was finished! I stood amid the litter I had made on the ground, and reflected. I had completed the preliminary trimming of one row and part of a second. There were still over two rows and a half to do. And the worst trees were in those rows, at that. After they were trimmed, there was all the litter to clear out, and the stubs to be painted, and cement work to be done. "Good gracious!" thought I, "if I do all that, when will I plant, when will I make my lawn?" Were you ever lost in the woods, so that you suddenly felt a mad desire to rush blindly in every direction, helpless, bewildered, with a horrid sensation that your heart has gone down somewhere into your abdomen? That is the way I suddenly felt toward my farm. I couldn't afford to employ more labour. Besides, I didn't want to. I wanted to do the work myself. But there was so much to do! I stood stock still and pulled myself together. "Rome was not built in a day," I told myself. "You just take out the worst of the dead wood in those remaining trees now, and finish them another season, or else at odd times during the summer." Then one of those things called a still, small voice whispered in my ear: "But you should never begin a new job till you have finished the old. Hoe out your row, my son!" I recognized the latter words as the catch phrase of a moral story in an ancient reader used in my boyhood school days. Oh, these blighting dogmas taught us in our youth! I resisted the still, small voice, but I felt secretly ashamed. That day I finished the orchard by merely taking out unsightly dead wood and a few of the worst suckers; so that one half of it looked naked and one half bearded, even as the half-shaved hunchback in the "Arabian Nights." I knew I was doing right, yet I felt I was doing wrong, and in my heart of hearts I was never quite happy for a year, till I had that orchard finished. Meanwhile, Hard Cider had finished the kitchen floor and cut out the new door frame into the dining-room, while the plumbers had mounted the boiler by the range and begun on the piping. Mike and Joe had been busy on the slope to the south, ploughing the most distant portion for the fodder crops and harrowing in load after load of old stable manure from the barn. The next day would bring them into the garden area, so I staked out my contemplated sundial lawn, allowing a liberal 250 feet, and ran the line westward till it came a trifle beyond the last woodshed, whence I ran it north to the shed for the grape arbour. West of the arbour, on the half acre of slope remaining before the plateau was reached, I planned to set out a new orchard--some day. That same night I filled out an order for fifty rambler roses! "I'll grow 'em on poles, till I can build the trellises," said I. Then I sat down to my manuscripts.