A Chapter On Weeding And Weeders, Human And Implemental Mrs. Tarryer As A Weed Exterminator And Trainer Of Farmers' Wives----Getting Near To Nature----Old Loudon And Mrs. Tarryer Do Not Agree.

THOUGH inclined to stoutness - the only thing she is jealous of except creeping intruders in her garden - Mrs. Tarryer is a great weed-er. She is none of your stooping, unseasonable, thumb-and-finger weed-ers, either ; but on time, a stand-up, knock-down and drag-out fighter, with fit weapons of the Joshua and Gideon pattern - revertible and with certain improvements. She knows as well as they did that weeds can be exterminated, if gardeners will mind their business early and late, and quit raising and scattering weed-seed on their neighbors.

To provide good company for herself, and helpmeets for worthy young men of her acquaintance, she takes choice girls into her kitchen - that being the holy of holies for a family. In this way she gets leisure to see to her garden. She is so certain to have her cooks and laundresses fluttering their afternoon ribbons out in it - quite leisurely - that it seems, sometimes, as though she was running a female agricultural college to train wives for farm missionaries among the experiment stations.

Her weight everybody else thinks is just about right. She keeps it down by tempting other people to eat heartily, or by weeding two rows to others' one in the garden. She started that with women and children, precisely as our factories, villages, and greatest centers of business were started. The more lovely young women she had, the more well-behaved young men gathered around her and the more she enlarged her garden. By furnishing tools they could own and use for themselves, while they were transacting their little and great personal and social preparations for regenerating the world - all under one - she always kept her garden in order. Weeding began in March and ended, in the garden, sometime in December. In those days I had to keep the horse-hoe running after the necessary hand-weeding had been done. Mrs. Tarryer was too good a general to deploy her forces among fine loose earth, to the needless making of tracks and the dusting of stockings. She had tools for picking out weeds in wet weather and between showers.

She considered the cases of the young men who were liable to drop into the garden for an hour or two, in fine weather, and being paired off, perhaps, with expert and trusty maidens, among such or such weediness (a most beautiful scene !), might have their neatest garden-trousers and fair weather slippers on - unless the lads went barefoot by special permission, among delicate strawberry runners or for coolness. There were reasons of culture, also, and nitrification as well as weed-killing, why loose earth should not be trampled like pressed bricks, and why Mrs. Tarryer preferred small feet in her garden.

During heated terms, days' works were often done before breakfast, partly on account of freckles, sure to poke into the closest sun-bonnet, where a girl was any way sandy, and partly to see whether young men would rise early upon occasion. On hot and dewy mornings, in the midst of haying, or when from catching weather, or any other reason, young men were not much expected, it was rumored that Mrs. Tarryer would kick her shoes and stockings off for the luxury of feeling the cool loam. She had no reason to be ashamed of her under-pinning, and people who have never seen neat toes peeping in and out among strawberry-vines, with brown earth or pine-straw-mulch for a back-ground, would be surprised to observe how much superior they are to dull sunrises.

In her way of making an out-door pleasure, and a study in biology and natural history for young people, of weeding, the form of her tools was a very important question. She spent years of thought and severest labor upon it. Being far-sighted herself and inclined to embonpoint, as before stated, she did not squat to weed, saw no reason in her young days for other people doing so, and contrived her tools accordingly. Shrewd metropolitan managers find that the most intellectual and gentlemanly tramps will break stones in the streets like good fellows, if given hammer-handles as long and lithe as billiard-cues. Mrs. Tarryer never speaks of woman's "position" - she takes that for granted, in the garden. She has seen the lines of Milton : "Him there they found, Squat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve" and trains young women to stand like weed-destroying athletes, and work at it as if they were determined goddesses governing the world ! Now and then a girl in her kitchen needed specs to pick over beans nicely ; but when it came to weeding garden Mrs. Tarryer would choose the openest labor for these and have them attended by chivalrous and eagle-eyed champions, who would see that their neighbor's rows were hoed, too. . Not till she came to the use of glasses herself, for fine print, was she aware of the grand compensation in the fact that the visual focus of near-sighted persons extends as they grow older, and how by that means matches can be so arranged on earth as to keep keen eyesight for all distances in the family.

Literary people, who are only clerks, the same as I am to Mrs. Tarryer, and Plato was to Socrates (the philosophical side of Zantippe), will make a regular muddle of right and wrong, as Plato and the clerks who attempt to follow him make of it, without a woman's counsel. We must be sharp to see how, from the beginning, and always, if any one shows truth in the garden, liars - curiously like "lawyers" already, in common speech - will squat around and deny it. We may have keen tools for weeding, but only the usual proportion of day-light; and there will continue to be in every family undeveloped and over-developed members, who will need to be told what are weeds and how to run them out or force them to change their natures. Gardens, with men and women in them, were established for this business in the first place, and never, as some people suppose, for weeds to flourish. Those are always contraband, no matter what the lawyers say.