With us, hitherto, a beet had been a beet, and a cabbage a cabbage;
but here were accounts of beets which, as Merton said, "beat all
creation," and pictures of prodigious cabbage heads which well-nigh
turned our own. With a blending of hope and distrust I carried two
of the catalogues to a shrewd old fellow in Washington Market. He
was a dealer in country produce who had done business so long at the
same stand that among his fellows he was looked upon as a kind of
patriarch. During a former interview he had replied to my questions
with a blunt honesty that had inspired confidence. The day was
somewhat mild, and I found him in his shirt-sleeves, smoking his
pipe among his piled-up barrels, boxes, and crates, after his eleven
o'clock dinner. His day's work was practically over; and well it
might be, for, like others of his calling, he had begun it long
before dawn. Now his old felt hat was pushed well back on his bald
head, and his red face, fringed with a grizzled beard, expressed a
sort of heavy, placid content. His small gray eyes twinkled as
shrewdly as ever. With his pipe he indicated a box on which I might
sit while we talked.

"See here, Mr. Bogart," I began, showing him the seed catalogues,
"how is a man to choose wisely what vegetables he will raise from a
list as long as your arm? Perhaps I shouldn't take any of those old-
fashioned kinds, but go into these wonderful novelties which promise
a new era in horticulture."

The old man gave a contemptuous grunt; then, removing his pipe, he
blew out a cloud of smoke that half obscured us both as he remarked,
gruffly, "'A fool and his money are soon parted.'"

This was about as rough as March weather; but I knew my man, and