Twelve Miles From a Lemon Author:Gail Hamilton General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1874 Original Publisher: Harper Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select f... more »rom more than a million books for free. Excerpt: III. HEML 0 CK POISON. No one can suspect how much trouble it would have been to make the world, until he has tried his own hand at world-making. Once we wanted a hill where nature had spread a plain. We undertook to raise one. A hill looks easy enough. For days, for weeks, men and horses and carts were digging, hauling, loading, and tipping, and it was not much of a hill after all. We came to the conclusion that it is easier to make a very large hole than a very small hill. When you have floundered in the dirt many days, when drags have crisscrossed your grounds in all directions, and harrows have scratched, and rollers have smoothed, and yet you need a magnifying glass to see where your hill is, you are prepared to read with new- admiration, "He spake, and it was done; he commanded, and it stood fast." . ' , Nevertheless, the spring-world ever calls you afresh. When the snow melts, when the brooks are unbound, and the skies grow tender, and the brown buds swell, the still small voice of the coming summer woos you into loving alliance with Nature fashioning the Earth to beauty. I suppose we are the proprietors of the poorest tract of land on the North American Continent; an'd theworst cultivated. Something is sure to be planted that we do not want, and something to be left out that we do want. What with cabbages and cows, and white beans hanging forgotten, brown and shriveled, to the shuddering vines for a mildew and a blight, till the snows drift over them, Hassan the Turk says there are three crops in which we excel: those which are planted and do not come up, those...« less