This matter of vegetable rank has not been at all studied as it
should be. Why do we respect some vegetables and despise others,
when all of them come to an equal honor or ignominy on the table?
The bean is a graceful, confiding, engaging vine; but you never can
put beans into poetry, nor into the highest sort of prose. There is
no dignity in the bean. Corn, which, in my garden, grows alongside
the bean, and, so far as I can see, with no affectation of
superiority, is, however, the child of song. It waves in all
literature. But mix it with beans, and its high tone is gone.
Succotash is vulgar. It is the bean in it. The bean is a vulgar
vegetable, without culture, or any flavor of high society among
vegetables. Then there is the cool cucumber, like so many people,
good for nothing when it is ripe and the wildness has gone out of it.
How inferior in quality it is to the melon, which grows upon a
similar vine, is of a like watery consistency, but is not half so
valuable! The cucumber is a sort of low comedian in a company where
the melon is a minor gentleman. I might also contrast the celery
with the potato. The associations are as opposite as the dining-room
of the duchess and the cabin of the peasant. I admire the potato,
both in vine and blossom; but it is not aristocratic. I began
digging my potatoes, by the way, about the 4th of July; and I fancy I
have discovered the right way to do it. I treat the potato just as I
would a cow. I do not pull them up, and shake them out, and destroy
them; but I dig carefully at the side of the hill, remove the fruit
which is grown, leaving the vine undisturbed: and my theory is, that
it will go on bearing, and submitting to my exactions, until the
frost cuts it down. It is a game that one would not undertake with a
vegetable of tone.

The lettuce is to me a most interesting study. Lettuce is like