Driven Back to Eden

and certain sale at some price, and what appeared to yield to the grower the best profits. There was much conflict of opinion, but I noted down and averaged the statements made to me. Many of the marketmen had hobbies, and told me how to make a fortune out of one or two articles; more gave careless, random, or ignorant answers; but here and there was a plain, honest, sensible fellow who showed me from his books what plain, honest, sensible producers in the country were doing. In a few weeks I dismissed finally the tendency to one blunder. A novice hears or reads of an acre of cabbages or strawberries producing so much. Then he figures, “if one acre yields so much, two acres will give twice as much,” and so on. The experience of others showed me the utter folly of all this; and I came to the conclusion that I could give my family shelter, plain food, pure air, wholesome work and play in plenty, and that not very soon could I provide much else with certainty. I tried to stick closely to common sense; and the humble circumstances of the vast majority living from the soil proved that there was in these pursuits no easy or speedy road to fortune. Therefore we must part reluctantly with every penny, and let a dollar go for only the essentials to the modest success now accepted as all we could naturally expect. We had explored the settled States, and even the Territories, in fancy; we had talked over nearly every industry from cotton and sugarcane planting to a sheep ranch. I encouraged all this, for it was so much education out of school hours; yet all, even Merton, eventually agreed with me that we had better not go far away, but seek a place near schools, markets, churches, and well inside of civilization.

“See here, youngsters, you forget the most important crop of all that I must cultivate,” I said one evening.

“What is that?” they cried in chorus.

“A crop of boys and girls. You may think that my mind is chiefly on corn and potatoes. Not at all. It is chiefly on you; and for your sakes mamma and I decided to go to the country.”

At last, in reply to my inquiries and my answers to advertisements, I received the following letter:⁠—

I had been to see two or three places that had been “cracked up” so highly that my wife thought it better to close the bargain at once before someone else secured the prize⁠—and I had come back disgusted in each instance.

“The soul of wit” was in John Jones’s letter. There was also a downright directness which hit the mark, and I wrote that I would go to Maizeville in the course of the following week.

VI

A Bluff Friend

The almanac had announced spring; nature appeared quite unaware of the fact, but, so far as we were concerned, the almanac was right. Spring was the era of hope, of change, and hope was growing in our hearts like “Jack’s bean,” in spite of lowering wintry skies. We were as eager as robins, sojourning in the south, to take our flight northward.

My duties to my employers had ceased the 1st of March: I had secured tenants who would take possession of our rooms as soon as we should leave them; and now every spare moment was given to studying the problem of country living and to preparations for departure. I obtained illustrated catalogues from several dealers in seeds, and we pored over them every evening. At first they bewildered us with their long lists of varieties, while the glowing descriptions of new kinds of vegetables just being introduced awakened in us something of a gambling spirit.

“How fortunate it is,” exclaimed my wife, “that we are going to the country just as the vegetable marvels were discovered! Why, Robert, if half of what is said is true, we shall make our fortunes.”

With us, hitherto, a beet had been a beet, and a cabbage a cabbage; but here were accounts of beets which, as Merton said, “beat all creation,” and pictures of prodigious cabbage heads which well-nigh turned our own. With a blending of hope and distrust I carried two of the catalogues to a shrewd old fellow in Washington Market. He was a dealer in country produce who had done business so long at the same stand that among his fellows he was looked upon as a kind of patriarch. During a former interview he had replied to my questions with a blunt honesty that had inspired confidence. The day was somewhat mild, and I found him in his shirtsleeves, smoking his pipe among his piled-up barrels, boxes, and crates, after his eleven o’clock dinner. His day’s work was practically over; and well it might be, for, like others of his calling, he had begun it long before dawn. Now his old felt hat was pushed well back on his bald head, and his red face, fringed with a grizzled beard, expressed a sort of heavy, placid content. His small gray eyes twinkled as shrewdly as ever. With his pipe he indicated a box on which I might sit while we talked.

“See here, Mr. Bogart,” I began, showing him the seed catalogues, “how is a man to choose wisely what vegetables he will raise from a list as long as your arm? Perhaps I shouldn’t take any of those old-fashioned kinds, but go into these wonderful novelties which promise a new era in horticulture.”

The old man gave a contemptuous grunt; then, removing his pipe, he blew out