BENJAMIN McNEIL MURDOCK
You know, from your school-days, that when you are trying to write, on a blond June morning, at a task that drags and dawdles in a springing world, there is nothing too insignificant to take your eye and captivate your interest. I had watched Murdock as absorbedly as if he were a red spider making a web on my window-screen. Yet I never intelligently saw what he was doing.
I saw merely a lank, commonplace, and simple-looking farmer, going about his chores in faded blue overalls, a seersucker shirt, and a straw hat of the kind that is called a "cow's breakfast." I was aware that his neighbors thought him crazy. I had heard it said that he talked to his vegetables in order to make them grow in the way he wished. I knew that he could not talk to his vegetables less than he talked to his neighbors; that if it were not for his wife, he would be as much cut off from human intercourse and understanding as one of his own prodigious potatoes. Everything about him—except her—seemed entirely ordinary and bucolic. We had only one question to puzzle ourselves with, "How did he ever come to marry her—or she him?"
Then I learned, from a chance reference in a technical review, that Murdock's experiments were professionally considered as important as those of Hugo de Vries; that Professor Jeddes accepted him as a successful exemplar of "a needed renewal of the rustic point of view," or, more fully, as "a naturalist who grasps not only the mechanical and
[ 131 ]
