There is another subject which is forced upon my notice. I like
neighbors, and I like chickens; but I do not think they ought to be
united near a garden. Neighbors' hens in your garden are an
annoyance. Even if they did not scratch up the corn, and peck the
strawberries, and eat the tomatoes, it is not pleasant to see them
straddling about in their jerky, high-stepping, speculative manner,
picking inquisitively here and there. It is of no use to tell the
neighbor that his hens eat your tomatoes: it makes no impression on
him, for the tomatoes are not his. The best way is to casually
remark to him that he has a fine lot of chickens, pretty well grown,
and that you like spring chickens broiled. He will take them away at
once.

The neighbors' small children are also out of place in your garden,
in strawberry and currant time. I hope I appreciate the value of
children. We should soon come to nothing without them, though the
Shakers have the best gardens in the world. Without them the common
school would languish. But the problem is, what to do with them in a
garden. For they are not good to eat, and there is a law against
making away with them. The law is not very well enforced, it is
true; for people do thin them out with constant dosing, paregoric,
and soothing-syrups, and scanty clothing. But I, for one, feel that
it would not be right, aside from the law, to take the life, even of
the smallest child, for the sake of a little fruit, more or less, in
the garden. I may be wrong; but these are my sentiments, and I am
not ashamed of them. When we come, as Bryant says in his "Iliad," to
leave the circus of this life, and join that innumerable caravan
which moves, it will be some satisfaction to us, that we have never,
in the way of gardening, disposed of even the humblest child