the snow went off.)

We have got down the forests, and exterminated savage beasts; but
Nature is no more subdued than before: she only changes her tactics,
--uses smaller guns, so to speak. She reenforces herself with a
variety of bugs, worms, and vermin, and weeds, unknown to the savage
state, in order to make war upon the things of our planting; and
calls in the fowls of the air, just as we think the battle is won, to
snatch away the booty. When one gets almost weary of the struggle,
she is as fresh as at the beginning,--just, in fact, ready for the
fray. I, for my part, begin to appreciate the value of frost and
snow; for they give the husbandman a little peace, and enable him,
for a season, to contemplate his incessant foe subdued. I do not
wonder that the tropical people, where Nature never goes to sleep,
give it up, and sit in lazy acquiescence.

Here I have been working all the season to make a piece of lawn. It
had to be graded and sowed and rolled; and I have been shaving it
like a barber. When it was soft, everything had a tendency to go on
to it,--cows, and especially wandering hackmen. Hackmen (who are a
product of civilization) know a lawn when they see it. They rather
have a fancy for it, and always try to drive so as to cut the sharp
borders of it, and leave the marks of their wheels in deep ruts of
cut-up, ruined turf. The other morning, I had just been running the
mower over the lawn, and stood regarding its smoothness, when I
noticed one, two, three puffs of fresh earth in it; and, hastening
thither, I found that the mole had arrived to complete the work of
the hackmen. In a half-hour he had rooted up the ground like a pig.
I found his run-ways. I waited for him with a spade. He did not
appear; but, the next time I passed by, he had ridged the ground in