feeling and natural enjoyment, possessed of a demoniac mania, lost to
the peace and serenity of the virtuous and the blessed, could find
pleasure amid the damps, and dews, and chills, and raw-edgedness of a
garden in the early morning, absolutely find pleasure in saturated
trousers, in shoes swathed in moisture, in skies that are gray and
gloomy, in flowers that are, as Mantalini would put it, 'demnition
moist'? The thing is incredible! Now, a garden, after the sun has dried
the paths, warmed the air, absorbed the dew, is admissible. But a
possession that compels an early turning out into fogs and discomforts
deserves for this fact alone the anathema of all rational beings.

"I really believe, sir, that the literature of the garden, so abundant
everywhere, is written in the interest of suburban land-owners. The
inviting one-sided picture so persistently held up is only a covert bit
of advertising, intended to seduce away happy cockneys of the town--men
supremely contented with their attics, their promenades in Fifth Avenue,
their visits to Central Park, where all is arranged for them without
their labor or concern, their evenings at the music gardens, their soft
morning slumbers, which know no dreadful chills and dews! How could a
back-ache over the pea-bed compensate for these felicities? How could
sour cherries, or half-ripe strawberries, or wet rosebuds, even if they
do come from one's own garden, reward him for the lose of the ease and
the serene conscience of one who sings merrily in the streets, and cares
not whether worms burrow, whether suns burn, whether birds steal,
whether winds overturn, whether droughts destroy, whether floods drown,
whether gardens flourish, or not?"--_Bachelor Bluff: his Opinions,
Sentiments, and Disputations_.