A Girls 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.

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