Country living is delightful, but, like all other blessings, it has its
alternates of shadow. I used to sit here by my window last April and
gloat over the prospects for the vegetable garden a tramp laid out and
seeded for me in the early spring. What luscious peas were going to
clamber over the trellis along about the middle of July! What golden
squashes were going to nestle in the little hollows! What lusty corn
was going to stride the hillocks! What colonies of beans and beds of
lettuce should fill the spaces, like stars in the wake of a triumphant
moon, and how odorous the breath of the healthful onion should be upon
the midsummer air! But listen. No Assyrian ever yet came down upon
the fold as my neighbor's chickens have descended upon the fair
territory of my garden. As for shooing a chicken off, my dear, when
its gigantic intellect is set upon scratching up a seeded bed, you
might as well attempt to wave back a thunderstorm with a fan.

I have undertaken several difficult things in my life, but never one so
hopeless as convincing a calm and resolute hen that she is an intruder.
I spent one glad summer trying to keep a brood out of a geranium bed,
and had typhoid fever all the fall just from overwork and worry. But
say there had been no chickens to "wear the heart and waste the body,"
how about potato bugs, and caterpillars and huge and gruesome slugs? I
never go out to sprinkle the sad pea vines or pick the drooping lettuce
but what I resolve myself into a magnet to lure the early
vegetable-devouring reptile from its lair. Large 7 by 9 caterpillars
and zebra-striped ladybugs disport themselves on neck and ankle until I
flee the scene.