Removing the weeds, putting fresh soil about the bean stems, and encouraging this weed which I had sown, making the yellow soil express its summer thought in bean leaves and blossoms rather than in wormwood and piper and millet grass, making the earth say beans instead of grass -- this was my daily work.
As I drew a still fresher soil about the rows with my hoe, I disturbed the ashes of unchronicled nations who in primeval years lived under these heavens, and their small implements of war and hunting were brought to the light of this modern day.
"I will bring you the soil to-morrow, and you will choose it for your bulb and for mine.
Every evening she brought to him, handful by handful, a quantity of soil from that part of the garden which he had found to be the best, and which, indeed, was excellent.
Theirs was not the mistake of the average city-dweller who flees in ultra-modern innocence to the
soil. They did not essay too much.
La Motte--he broke the
soil, planted vines and orchards, instituted commercial fish culture, built a mansion renowned in its day, was defeated by the
soil, and passed.
Nothing so arid as these reliefs, nothing so sad as these ruins of mountains, and (if we may so express ourselves) these fragments of peaks and mountains which strewed the
soil. The satellite seemed to have burst at this spot.
"Do you know what the old settlers did with this beautiful
soil? Planted the flats in grain and pastured cattle on the hills.
To this the American Review replied that the
soil of Florida, although not equally rich, afforded the best conditions for the moulding and casting of the Columbiad, consisting as it did of sand and argillaceous earth.
Nevertheless, on some islands only 360 miles northward of our new Cape Horn in Denmark, a carcass buried in the
soil (or if washed into a shallow sea, and covered up with mud) would be preserved perpetually frozen.
Luxuriant vegetation spread in wild profuseness over this prodigal
soil.
"MY boy," said an aged Father to his fiery and disobedient Son, "a hot temper is the
soil of remorse.