As A matter of fact, I didn't. I went to sleep again at five, and slept till seven. It's not nearly so easy as it sounds in books to change all your habits of life. But I resolved to try again the next morning, and meanwhile to keep awake that night at all costs. Then, after breakfast, I set out for my farm. Hard Cider would be there with the estimate. The rest of that row of orchard was waiting for me. Mike and Joe would finish harrowing the potato field and begin planting. I almost ran down the road!

What is there about remodelling an old house, renovating an old orchard, planting a fresh-ploughed field, even building a chicken coop, which inspires us to such enthusiasm? I have written a few things of which I am not ashamed, and taken great joy in their creation. But it was not the same joy as that I take in making even one new garden bed, and not in the least comparable to the joy of those first glorious days when my old house was shaping up anew. It has often seemed to me almost biological, this delight in domestic planning both inside and outside of the dwelling — as though it were foreordained that man should have each his own plot of earth, which calls out a primal and instinctive aestheticism like nothing else, and is coupled with the domestic instinct to reinforce it. I have known men deaf and blind to every other form of beauty who clung with a loyal and redeeming love to the flowers in their dooryard.

As I came into my own dooryard, I found Hard Cider unloading lumber. He nodded briefly, and handed me a dirty slip of paper — his estimate. Evidently he, too, had paternally taken me over, for this estimate included the plumber's bill for a heater, the water connections for house and barn, a boiler on the kitchen range, and the bathroom. The bill would come to $3,000. That far exceeded my own estimate, and I had still the painters to reckon with! However, Hard's bill seemed fair enough, for Bert had told me the price of lumber, and there was a lot of digging to connect with the town main. I nodded "Go ahead," and opened the door. In three minutes he and his assistant were busily at work.

In the woodshed I found Mike cutting up the seed potatoes into baskets.

"Good mornin'," he said. "Joe's got the tooth harrer workin', and we'll be plantin' this afternoon."

I started then toward the orchard, only to meet the boss plumber arriving. With him I went down cellar to decide on the position for the heater. "Of course you're going to have hot water?" said the boss.

"Am I?" said I. "I loathe radiators. They spoil the rooms. Wouldn't you, as a great concession, let me have old-fashioned hot air?"

"You can have anything you want, of course," the plumber replied, being, like most of his kind, without a sense of humour, "but to get register pipes upstairs in this old house you'll spoil your rooms more than with radiators. We have some very ornamental radiators."

"There ain't no such animal," said I.

But I ended with hot water. There were to be four radiators downstairs and three upstairs, one in the bathroom, one in the hall, and one in a chamber. The other chambers, having fireplaces, I decided needed no further heat, though the plumber was mournfully skeptical. That made seven in all, and did not call for a large heater. After much dickering and argument, the plumber consented to leave the old copper pump at the sink, in addition to the faucets. I refused to let that pump go, with its polished brass knob on the iron handle, even though the sink was to be replaced by a porcelain one. As the bathroom was almost over the kitchen, and as the house already had a good cesspool, by some happy miracle, the work was comparatively simple, and the plumber left to get his men and supplies.

Again I started for the orchard. Already the buds were swelling on the old trees, and the haze of nascent foliage hung over them. I had four and a half rows to trim, and then the whole orchard to go over with paint pot and gouge and cement. I had never trimmed a tree in my life till the day before, yet I felt that I was doing a better job than Bert had done on his trees, for Bert's idea of pruning was to cut off all the limbs he could reach near the trunk, often leaving a stub four inches long when it didn't happen to be convenient to saw closer. He made his living, and a good one, selling milk and cauliflowers — he had thirty acres down to cauliflowers, and shipped them to New York — but, like so many New England farmers, he couldn't or wouldn't understand the simple science of tree culture. Anybody can learn tree culture with a little application to the right books or models and a little imagination to see into the future. A good tree pruner has to be a bit of an architect. I thought so then in my pride, at any rate, and it turned out I was right. Right or wrong, however, I went at my job that morning with a mighty zest, and soon had a second barrier of dead wood heaped upon the ground.

As I worked, I thought how this orchard must be trimmed and cleaned up first, but how the fine planting weather was upon us, too, and I ought to be getting my garden seeds in, if I was to have any flowers. I thought, also, of all my manuscripts to be read. A nervous fit seized me, and I worked frantically. "How on earth shall I ever find time for all I've got to do?" I said to myself, sending the saw into a dead limb with a vicious jab. But I soon discovered that nervous haste wasn't helping any. In my excitement, I cleaned off all the suckers on a limb, and suddenly realized that I should have left two or three of the strongest to make new wood, as the limb itself was past bearing. I thought of Mike's reflection, that he kept his thoughts on his gardening. So I calmed down, and gave my whole attention to my work, making a little study of each limb, deciding what I wished to leave for future development, and what would give the best decorative effect to my slope as well. You can really trim an old apple tree into a thing of gnarled power and quaint charm by a little care.

Tap, tap, tap, came the sound of hammers from my house. The plumbers had returned, and I could hear them rattling pipes. The water company was digging for the connections. Now and then a shout from Joe to the horses was wafted down from the plateau. A pair of persistent song sparrows, building in an evergreen by the brook, kept up a steady song. A robin sang in the next tree to me. The sun beat warmly on my neck. And I sawed and pruned, keeping steadily to my job, treating each tree and limb as a separate and important problem, till I heard the hammers cease at noon.

I had almost completed my first row!

As I returned from dinner, Joe was walking the drills in the potato field, dropping the fertilizer, and the bent form of Mike followed immediately behind him, dropping the seed from a basket. Joe walked with a fine, free stride, and dropped the fertilizer from his hand with a perfectly rhythmic gesture. The father's bent back behind him was an added touch from Millet. But the lone pine and the blue mountains gave a bright, sharp quality to the landscape which was quite unlike Millet. The picture held me, however, as do the Frenchman's canvases. Even my knowledge of Mike's comfortable home and happy disposition did not rob it of that subtle pathos of agricultural toil. Why the pathos, I asked myself? Mike is healthy and happy. No toil is more healthful. I'm working as hard as Mike, and having a glorious time! To be sure, I'm working my own land, but Mike, too, has a garden of his own, yet doubtless looks as pathetic in it. I could find no solution, unless it be that instinctive belief of a city-bred civilization that all joys are urban. Just then, however, Mike straightened up with a laugh, and the pathos vanished.

"So the pathos," thought I, as I caught myself instinctively straightening, too, "is a matter of spinal sympathy!"

This was a most comforting reflection, and I hastened to investigate Hard Cider's morning work. The kitchen floor was ready to relay. Over the old planking he had spread tar paper, then carefully adjusted a light, half-inch framework, and on top of this was laying the new floor.

"Thet'll keep out the cold," he said briefly, carefully lifting the lid of the stove and spitting into the fire pot.

I examined the framework on which he was laying the new floor. It was as carefully jointed as if it were the floor itself.

"Why so much pains with this?" I asked, pointing with my toe.

"Why not?" Hard Cider replied, as the March Hare replied to Alice.

I was braver than Alice. "But it doesn't show," I said.

"Somebody might take the floor up," he retorted, with some scorn.

"Hard Cider, after all, is an artist," I thought. "He has the artistic conscience — and, being a Yankee, he won't admit it."

I went back to my orchard, working with a greater confidence and speed now, born of practice; and I had begun on the second row by five o'clock. Then I walked up to the plateau. Joe was working overtime, covering the drills, while his father was doing the stable work. I staked the three sections of the field containing Early Rose, Dibble's Russet, and Irish Cobbler respectively, and entered in my notebook the date of planting. It occurred to me then and there to keep a diary of all seeds, soils, fertilizers, and plantings, noting weather conditions and pests during the growing season, and the time, quality, and quantity of harvest. That diary I began the same evening; I have kept it religiously ever since, and I have learned more about agriculture from its pages than from any other book — something I don't say vainly at all, because it is but the careful tabulation of practical experience, and that is any man's best teacher.

I picked up a hoe and helped Joe cover drills for half an hour. Thanks to golf and rowing, my hands were already calloused, or I don't know what would have happened to them in those first days!

Then I walked back to my house. I could not bring myself to leave it. I walked down through the littered orchard to the brook, and planned out a cement dam and a pool. Then I walked back to the south side of the dwelling, and looked out over the slope where my main vegetable farm was to be. The land had been ploughed close up to the house. It would be easy to level it off for a hundred feet or more into a grass terrace, with a rose hedge at the end to shut out the farm, and a sundial in the centre. To the east it would go naturally into an extension of the orchard; to the west it would end at a grape arbour just beyond the farthest woodshed. I would place my garden hotbeds against the sheltered south side of the kitchen, and screen them with a bed of hollyhocks running west from the end of the main house, which extended in a jog some twelve or fifteen feet beyond the kitchen. Thus one end of my pergola veranda would naturally run off into a hollyhock walk, the other into the grassy slope of the orchard, while directly in front of the glass door would be the lawn, the sundial, and then a white bench against the rambler hedge. I saw it all as I stood there, saw it and thrilled to it as a painter must thrill to a new conception; thrilled, also, at the prospect of achieving it with my own hands; thrilled at the thought of dwelling with it all my days. I must have remained there a long time, lost in reverie, for I was very late to supper, and Mrs. Temple was not so cheerful as her wont.

That night I managed to keep awake till eleven, and got some work done. I also rose at a compromise hour of six in the morning, and worked another hour, almost catching up with what should have been my daily stint. But I realized that hereafter I could not work on the farm all day. I must give up my mornings to my manuscript reading.

"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.

The next morning I managed to prod myself out of bed at five-thirty, and found that I could do more work before breakfast than in three hours in the evening. I must confess I was a little annoyed at this verification of a hoary superstition. Personally, I like best to work at night, and some day I shall work at night again. It is a goal to strive for. But you cannot drive your brain at night when you've been driving your body all day. That, alas! is a drawback on farming.

Reaching my farm at eight, I found Joe harrowing in manure on the garden and Mike sowing peas.

"Can I have the horse to-morrow?" said I.

"Yez cannot," said Mike. "Sure, we'll be another day at the least gettin' the garden ready."

"But I want to grade my lawn," I said. "The day after, then?"

"Maybe," said Mike. "Yez must make lawns when there's nothin' else at all to do."

"Yes, sir," I replied, and he grinned.

That sundial lawn had now taken possession of my imagination. My fingers fairly itched to be at it. I lingered fondly on the rough furrowed slope as I crossed to the orchard, and saw a rambler in pink or red glory at each of my stakes, climbing a trellis and making a great, outdoor room for my house. I stepped into the house straightway, and told Hard Cider to order the trellis lumber for me.

Then I went at my orchard. Armed with a gouge, a mallet, a bag of cement, a barrowful of sand, a box for mixing, a trowel, and a pail of carbolic solution, I gouged out a few — only a few — of the worst cavities in the old trunks, washed them, and filled them with cement. It was a slow process, that took me all the morning, and I fear it was none too neatly done, for I had never worked in cement before. Moreover, I will admit that I got frightened at my inexperience, and confined my experiments to three or four cavities. But it was extraordinarily interesting. I found a certain childish fascination in the similarity of the work to a dentist's filling teeth. If every tree died, I told myself, I would still have been repaid in the fun of doing the job myself. Early in the afternoon I started to paint the scars where limbs had been removed, but changed my mind suddenly, and decided to clean up the litter on the ground first. The orchard looked so disgusting. So for more than three hours I sawed and chopped, chopped and sawed, carted wheelbarrow load after wheelbarrow load of firewood to the shed, and load after load of brush and dead stuff to a heap in the garden. Still the rake brought up more litter from the tangled grass (for the orchard had not been mowed the year before), and still I trundled the barrow back for it.

When six o'clock came I was still carting from the top of the orchard, and for an hour past I had been working with that grim automatism which characterizes the last lap of a two-mile race. There is no joy of creation in clearing up! It is just a grind. And yet it is a part of creation, too, the final stage in the achievement of garden beauty. I wonder if any gardener exists, though, with the imagination so to regard it while he cleans? Certainly I am not the man. I then and there resolved to finish the job by installments, from day to day. Perhaps, taken a little at a time, it would not seem so boresome!

The next morning the smoke of my burning brush pile was coming over the hill as I drew near my farm. The harrow was at work in the garden. Hard's hammer was ringing from the chamber over the dining-room, which he was converting into a bathroom so that the plumbers could get to work in it. The old orchard trees held up their cropped and denuded tops with a brave show of buds, and I debated with myself what I should do. "Spray!" I decided. So I got a hoe, and started to scrape the trees mildly on the trunks and large lower limbs, while my lime-sulphur mixture was boiling on the stove. I soon found that here, again, I had tackled a job which would require a day, not an hour, so I gave it up, and put the solution in my spraying barrel, summoned Joe to the pump, and sprayed for scale on the unscraped bark. I was by this time getting used to half measures. You have to, when you try to bring up a farm with limited labour!

The wiseacre has now, of course, foreseen that I killed all the young buds. Alas! I am again compelled to spoil a good story, and confess that I didn't kill any of them. I mixed the lime-sulphur one part to sixty, for I carefully read the warning in my spraying bulletin. I have my doubts whether it was strong enough to kill the scale, certainly not with the bark left on, but at least it was weak enough not to kill the buds, and it was fun applying it.

"There," I cried, as noon came, "the orchard may rest for the present! Now for the next thing!"

Have you ever watched a small boy picking berries? He never picks a bush clean, but rushes after this or that big cluster of fruit which strikes his eye, covering half an acre of ground while you, perhaps, are stripping a single clump of bushes. And he is usually amazed when your pail fills quicker than his. Alas! I fear I was much like that small boy during my first season on the farm, or at any rate during the first month or two. There was little "efficiency" in my methods — but, oh, much delight!

I fairly gobbled my dinner, and rushed back, a fever of work upon me. Seed beds, that was what I wanted next. As I had planned to put my garden cold-frames along the south wall of the kitchen, I decided to make my temporary seed beds there. Mike assented to the plan as a good one, and I had him dump me a load of manure, while I brought earth from the nearest point in the garden, spaded up the soil, mixed in the garden earth and dressing, and then worked and reworked it with a rake, and finally with my hands.

Ah, the joy of working earth with your naked hands, making it ready for planting! The ladies I had seen in their gardens always wore gloves. Even my mother, I recalled, in her little garden, had always worn gloves. Surely, thought I, they miss something — the cool, moist feel of the loam, the very sensations of the seeds themselves. At four o'clock I had my bed ready, and I got my seed packets, sorted them in a tin tobacco box, and began to sow the seeds. The directions which I read with scrupulous care always said, "press the earth down firmly with a board." I was working with a flat mason's trowel, so I got up and found a board. It wasn't half so easy to work with, but I was taking no chances!

"There must," I grinned, "be some magic efficacy in that board."

The seeds were not my own selection. They had been chosen for me by Professor Grey's assistant. That, I confess, was a cloud on my pleasure. Half the fun in sowing flower seeds comes from your hope of achieving those golden promises held out by the seed catalogues — like a second marriage, alas! too often "the triumph of hope over experience" — or else from your memory of some bright bed of the year before.

But the cloud was a small one, after all. I sat in the afternoon sun, beneath my kitchen windows, opening little packets of annuals with grimy fingers that turned the white papers brown, and gently, lovingly, put the seeds into the ground. I had no beds as yet to transplant them to; very often I didn't know whether they could be transplanted. (As it turned out, I wasted all my poppy seeds.) But I was in no mood to wait. As each little square was sown, I thrust the packet on a stick for a marker, and hitched along to the next square. Bachelors' buttons, love-in-a-mist, Drummond's phlox, zinnias, asters, stock, annual larkspur, cosmos, mignonette (of course I lost all that later, as well as the poppies), marigolds, nasturtiums, and several more went into the soil. My border seeds, the sweet alyssum and lobelia, I had sense enough not to plant, and I sowed none of the perennials. But what I put in was enough to keep a gardener busy the rest of the summer. Then I got my new watering-pot, filled it at the kitchen sink, and gently watered the hopeful earth.

Mike and Joe were unhitching the horse from the harrow as I finished. The great brown slope of the vegetable garden, lying away from the house toward the ring of southern hills, was ready for planting. There was my farm, thence would come my profits — if profits there should be. But just at that moment the little strip of soaked seed bed behind me was more important. It stood for the colour box with which I was going to paint, for the fragrant pigments out of which I should create about my dwelling a dream of gardens.

"After all," I thought, "a country place is but half realized without its garden, even though it be primarily a farm; and the richness of country living is but half fulfilled unless we become painters with shrub and tree and flower. I cannot draw, nor sing, nor play. Perhaps I cannot even write. But surely I can express myself here, about me, in colour and landscape charm, and not be any the worse farmer for that. I have my work; I shall write; I shall be a farmer; I shall be a gardener — an artist in flowers; I shall make my house lovely within; I shall live a rich, full life. Surely I am a happy, a fortunate, man!"

I put the watering-pot back in the shed, crossed the road to the old wooden pump by the barn on a sudden impulse, and pumped water on my hands and head, for I was hot. Mike stood in the barn door and laughed.

"What are yez doin' that for?" he asked.

I stood up and shook the water from my face and hair. "Just to be a kid, I guess," I laughed.

There are some things Mike couldn't understand. Perhaps I did not clearly understand myself. In some dim way an old pump before a barn and the shock of water from its spout on my head was fraught with happy memories and with dreams. The sight of the pump at that moment had waked the echo of their mood.

But as I plodded up the road in the May twilight to supper, one of those memories came back with haunting clearness — a summer day, a long tramp, the tender wistfulness of young love shy at its own too sudden passion, the plunge of cool water from a pump, and then at twilight half-spoken words, and words unspoken, sweeter still!

The amethyst glow went off the hills that ring our valley, and a far blue peak faded into the gathering dusk. A light shivered off my spirit, too. I felt suddenly cold, and the cheery face of Mrs. Temple was the face of a stranger. I felt unutterably lonely and depressed. My farm was dust and ashes. That evening I savagely turned down a manuscript by a rather well-known author, and went to bed without confessing what was the matter with me. The matter was, I had pumped up a ghost.