because my father always stopped work and went indoors if any one
watched him. His special manure was apt to arouse a troublesome
spirit of inquiry in hardy natures.

In digging his rows and shaping his patches he neglected the guiding
string and trusted to his eye altogether too much, and the
consequent obliquity and the various wind-breaks and scare-crows he
erected, and particularly an irrigation contrivance he began and
never finished by which everything was to be watered at once by
means of pieces of gutter from the roof and outhouses of Number 2,
and a large and particularly obstinate clump of elder-bushes in the
abolished hedge that he had failed to destroy entirely either by axe
or by fire, combined to give the gardens under intensive culture a
singularly desolate and disorderly appearance. He took steps
towards the diversion of our house drain under the influence of the
Sewage Utilisation Society; but happily he stopped in time. He
hardly completed any of the operations he began; something else
became more urgent or simply he tired; a considerable area of the
Number 2 territory was never even dug up.

In the end the affair irritated him beyond endurance. Never was a
man less horticulturally-minded. The clamour of these vegetables he
had launched into the world for his service and assistance, wore out
his patience. He would walk into the garden the happiest of men
after a day or so of disregard, talking to me of history perhaps or
social organisation, or summarising some book he had read. He
talked to me of anything that interested him, regardless of my
limitations. Then he would begin to note the growth of the weeds.
"This won't do," he would say and pull up a handful.