Mountain Interval/A Girl's Garden

A NEIGHBOR of mine in the village
 * Likes to tell how one spring

When she was a girl on the farm, she did
 * A childlike thing.

One day she asked her father
 * To give her a garden plot

To plant and tend and reap herself,
 * And he said, “Why not?”

In casting about for a corner
 * He thought of an idle bit

Of walled-off ground where a shop had stood,
 * And he said, “Just it.”

And he said, “That ought to make you
 * An ideal one-girl farm,

And give you a chance to put some strength
 * On your slim-jim arm.”

It was not enough of a garden,
 * Her father said, to plough;

So she had to work it all by hand,
 * But she don’t mind now.

She wheeled the dung in the wheelbarrow
 * Along a stretch of road;

But she always ran away and left
 * Her not-nice load.

And hid from anyone passing.
 * And then she begged the seed.

She says she thinks she planted one
 * Of all things but weed.

A hill each of potatoes,
 * Radishes, lettuce, peas,

Tomatoes, beets, beans, pumpkins, corn,
 * And even fruit trees

And yes, she has long mistrusted
 * That a cider apple tree

In bearing there to-day is hers,
 * Or at least may be.

Her crop was a miscellany
 * When all was said and done,

A little bit of everything,
 * A great deal of none.

Now when she sees in the village
 * How village things go,

Just when it seems to come in right,
 * She says, “I know!

It’s as when I was a farmer——”
 * Oh, never by way of advice!

And she never sins by telling the tale
 * To the same person twice.