MEANWHILE MY beans, the length of whose rows, added together, was
seven miles already planted, were impatient to be hoed, for the
earliest had grown considerably before the latest were in the
ground; indeed they were not easily to be put off. What was the
meaning of this so steady and self-respecting, this small Herculean
labor, I knew not. I came to love my rows, my beans, though so many
more than I wanted. They attached me to the earth, and so I got
strength like Antaeus. But why should I raise them? Only Heaven knows.
This was my curious labor all summer- to make this portion of the
earth's surface, which had yielded only cinquefoil, blackberries,
johnswort, and the like, before, sweet wild fruits and pleasant
flowers, produce instead this pulse. What shall I learn of beans or
beans of me? I cherish them, I hoe them, early and late I have an
eye to them; and this is my day's work. It is a fine broad leaf to
look on. My auxiliaries are the dews and rains which water this dry
soil, and what fertility is in the soil itself, which for the most
part is lean and effete. My enemies are worms, cool days, and most
of all woodchucks. The last have nibbled for me a quarter of an acre
clean. But what right had I to oust johnswort and the rest, and
break up their ancient herb garden? Soon, however, the remaining beans
will be too tough for them, and go forward to meet new foes.
When I was four years old, as I well remember, I was brought from
Boston to this my native town, through these very woods and this
field, to the pond. It is one of the oldest seenes stamped on my
memory. And now tonight my flute has waked the echoes over that very
water. The pines still stand here older than I; or, if some have
fallen, I have cooked my supper with their stumps, and a new growth is
rising all around, preparing another aspect for new infant eyes.
Almost the same johnswort springs from the same perennial root in this
pasture, and even I have at length helped to clothe that fabulous
landscape of my infant dreams, and one of the results of my presence
and influence is seen in these bean leaves, corn blades, and potato
vines.
I planted about two acres and a half of upland; and as it was only
about fifteen years since the land was cleared, and I myself had got
out two or three cords of stumps, I did not give it any manure; but in
the course of the summer it appeared by the arrowheads which I
turned up in hoeing, that an extinct nation had anciently dwelt here
and planted corn and beans ere white men came to clear the land, and
so, to some extent, had exhausted the soil for this very crop.
Before yet any woodchuck or squirrel had run across the road, or the
sun had got above the shrub oaks, while all the dew was on, though the
farmers warned me against it- I would advise you to do all your work
if possible while the dew is on- I began to level the ranks of haughty
weeds in my bean-field and throw dust upon their heads. Early in the
morning I worked barefooted, dabbling like a plastic artist in the
dewy and crumbling sand, but later in the day the sun blistered my
feet. There the sun lighted me to hoe beans, pacing slowly backward
and forward over that yellow gravelly upland, between the long green
rows, fifteen rods, the one end terminating in a shrub oak copse where
I could rest in the shade, the other in a blackberry field where the
green berries deepened their tints by the time I had made another
bout. 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 had little aid from horses or
cattle, or hired men or boys, or improved implements of husbandry, I
was much slower, and became much more intimate with my beans than
usual. But labor of the hands, even when pursued to the verge of
drudgery, is perhaps never the worst form of idleness. It has a
constant and imperishable moral, and to the scholar it yields a
classic result. A very agricola laboriosus was I to travellers bound
westward through Lincoln and Wayland to nobody knows where; they
sitting at their ease in gigs, with elbows on knees, and reins loosely
hanging in festoons; I the home-staying, laborious native of the soil.
But soon my homestead was out of their sight and thought. It was the
only open and cultivated field for a great distance on either side
of the road, so they made the most of it; and sometimes the man in the
field heard more of travellers' gossip and comment than was meant
for his ear: "Beans so late! peas so late!"- for I continued to
plant when others had begun to hoe- the ministerial husbandman had not
suspected it. "Corn, my boy, for fodder; corn for fodder." "Does he
live there?" asks the black bonnet of the gray coat; and the
hard-featured farmer reins up his grateful dobbin to inquire what
you are doing where he sees no manure in the furrow, and recommends
a little chip dirt, or any little waste stuff, or it may be ashes or
plaster. But here were two acres and a half of furrows, and only a hoe
for cart and two hands to draw it- there being an aversion to other
carts and horses- and chip dirt far away. Fellow-travellers as they
rattled by compared it aloud with the fields which they had passed, so
that I came to know how I stood in the agricultural world. This was
one field not in Mr. Colman's report. And, by the way, who estimates
the value of the crop which nature yields in the still wilder fields
unimproved by man? The crop of English hay is carefully weighed, the
moisture calculated, the silicates and the potash; but in all dells
and pond-holes in the woods and pastures and swamps grows a rich and
various crop only unreaped by man. Mine was, as it were, the
connecting link between wild and cultivated fields; as some states are
civilized, and others half-civilized, and others savage or
barbarous, so my field was, though not in a bad sense, a
half-cultivated field. They were beans cheerfully returning to their
wild and primitive state that I cultivated, and my hoe played the Ranz
des Vaches for them.
Near at hand, upon the topmost spray of a birch, sings the brown
thrasher- or red mavis, as some love to call him- all the morning,
glad of your society, that would find out another farmer's field if
yours were not here. While you are planting the seed, he cries-
"Drop it, drop it- cover it up, cover it up- pull it up, pull it up,
pull it up." But this was not corn, and so it was safe from such
enemies as he. You may wonder what his rigmarole, his amateur Paganini
performances on one string or on twenty, have to do with your
planting, and yet prefer it to leached ashes or plaster. It was a
cheap sort of top dressing in which I had entire faith.
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. They lay mingled
with other natural stones, some of which bore the marks of having been
burned by Indian fires, and some by the sun, and also bits of
pottery and glass brought hither by the recent cultivators of the
soil. When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to
the woods and the sky, and was an accompaniment to my labor which
yielded an instant and immeasurable crop. It was no longer beans
that I hoed, nor I that hoed beans; and I remembered with as much pity
as pride, if I remembered at all, my acquaintances who had gone to the
city to attend the oratorios. The nighthawk circled overhead in the
sunny afternoons- for I sometimes made a day of it- like a mote in the
eye, or in heaven's eye, falling from time to time with a swoop and
a sound as if the heavens were rent, torn at last to very rags and
tatters, and yet a seamless cope remained; small imps that fill the
air and lay their eggs on the ground on bare sand or rocks on the tops
of hills, where few have found them; graceful and slender like ripples
caught up from the pond, as leaves are raised by the wind to float
in the heavens; such kindredship is in nature. The hawk is aerial
brother of the wave which he sails over and surveys, those his perfect
air- inflated wings answering to the elemental unfledged pinions of
the sea. Or sometimes I watched a pair of hen- hawks circling high
in the sky, alternately soaring and descending, approaching, and
leaving one another, as if they were the embodiment of my own
thoughts, Or I was attracted by the passage of wild pigeons from
this wood to that, with a slight quivering winnowing sound and carrier
haste; or from under a rotten stump my hoe turned up a sluggish
portentous and outlandish spotted salamander, a trace of Egypt and the
Nile, yet our contemporary. When I paused to lean on my hoe, these
sounds and sights I heard and saw anywhere in the row, a part of the
inexhaustible entertainment which the country offers.
On gala days the town fires its great guns, which echo like
popguns to these woods, and some waifs of martial music occasionally
penetrate thus far. To me, away there in my bean-field at the other
end of the town, the big guns sounded as if a puffball had burst;
and when there was a military turnout of which I was ignorant, I
have sometimes had a vague sense all the day of some sort of itching
and disease in the horizon, as if some eruption would break out
there soon, either scarlatina or canker-rash, until at length some
more favorable puff of wind, making haste over the fields and up the
Wayland road, brought me information of the "trainers." It seemed by
the distant hum as if somebody's bees had swarmed, and that the
neighbors, according to Virgil's advice, by a faint tintinnabulum upon
the most sonorous of their domestic utensils, were endeavoring to call
them down into the hive again. And when the sound died quite away, and
the hum had ceased, and the most favorable breezes told no tale, I
knew that they had got the last drone of them all safely into the
Middlesex hive, and that now their minds were bent on the honey with
which it was smeared.
I felt proud to know that the liberties of Massachusetts and of
our fatherland were in such safe keeping; and as I turned to my hoeing
again I was filled with an inexpressible confidence, and pursued my
labor cheerfully with a calm trust in the future.
When there were several bands of musicians, it sounded as if all the
village was a vast bellows and all the buildings expanded and
collapsed alternately with a din. But sometimes it was a really
noble and inspiring strain that reached these woods, and the trumpet
that sings of fame, and I felt as if I could spit a Mexican with a
good relish- for why should we always stand for trifles?- and looked
round for a woodchuck or a skunk to exercise my chivalry upon. These
martial strains seemed as far away as Palestine, and reminded me of
a march of crusaders in the horizon, with a slight tantivy and
tremulous motion of the elm tree tops which overhang the village. This
was one of the great days; though the sky had from my clearing only
the same everlastingly great look that it wears daily, and I saw no
difference in it.
It was a singular experience that long acquaintance which I
cultivated with beans, what with planting, and hoeing, and harvesting,
and threshing, and picking over and selling them- the last was the
hardest of all- I might add eating, for I did taste. I was
determined to know beans. When they were growing, I used to hoe from
five o'clock in the morning till noon, and commonly spent the rest
of the day about other affairs. Consider the intimate and curious
acquaintance one makes with various kinds of weeds- it will bear
some iteration in the account, for there was no little iteration in
the labor- disturbing their delicate organizations so ruthlessly,
and making such invidious distinctions with his hoe, levelling whole
ranks of one species, and sedulously cultivating another. That's Roman
wormwood- that's pigweed- that's sorrel- that's piper-grass- have at
him, chop him up, turn his roots upward to the sun, don't let him have
a fibre in the shade, if you do he'll turn himself t'other side up and
be as green as a leek in two days. A long war, not with cranes, but
with weeds, those Trojans who had sun and rain and dews on their side.
Daily the beans saw me come to their rescue armed with a hoe, and thin
the ranks of their enemies, filling up the trenches with weedy dead.
Many a lusty crest- waving Hector, that towered a whole foot above his
crowding comrades, fell before my weapon and rolled in the dust.
Those summer days which some of my contemporaries devoted to the
fine arts in Boston or Rome, and others to contemplation in India, and
others to trade in London or New York, I thus, with the other
farmers of New England, devoted to husbandry. Not that I wanted
beans to eat, for I am by nature a Pythagorean, so far as beans are
concerned, whether they mean porridge or voting, and exchanged them
for rice; but, perchance, as some must work in fields if only for
the sake of tropes and expression, to serve a parable-maker one day.
It was on the whole a rare amusement, which, continued too long, might
have become a dissipation. Though I gave them no manure, and did not
hoe them all once, I hoed them unusualy well as far as I went, and was
paid for it in the end, "there being in truth," as Evelyn says, "no
compost or laetation whatsoever comparable to this continual motion,
repastination, and turning of the mould with the spade." "The
earth," he adds elsewhere, "especially if fresh, has a certain
magnetism in it, by which it attracts the salt, power, or virtue (call
it either) which gives it life, and is the logic of all the labor
and stir we keep about it, to sustain us; all dungings and other
sordid temperings being but the vicars succedaneous to this
improvement." Moreover, this being one of those "worn- out and
exhausted lay fields which enjoy their sabbath," had perchance, as Sir
Kenelm Digby thinks likely, attracted "vital spirits" from the air.
I harvested twelve bushels of beans.
But to be more particular, for it is complained that Mr. Colman
has reported chiefly the expensive experiments of gentlemen farmers,
my outgoes were,
For a hoe.....................................$ 0.54
Plowing, harrowing, and furrowing............. 7.50 (Too much.)
Beans for seed................................ 3.12 1/2
Potatoes for seed............................. 1.33
Peas for seed................................. 0.40
Turnip seed................................... 0.06
White line for crow fence..................... 0.02
Horse cultivator and boy three hours.......... 1.00
Horse and cart to get crop.................... 0.75
-----
In all.......................................$ 14.72 1/2
My income was (patremfamilias vendacem, non emacem esse oportet),
from
Nine bushels and twelve quarts of beans sold..$ 16.94
Five bushels large potatoes................... 2.50
Nine bushels small potatoes................... 2.25
Grass......................................... 1.00
Stalks........................................ 0.75
-----
In all......................................$ 23.44
Leaving a pecuniary profit,
as I have elsewhere said, of..............$ 8.71 1/2
This is the result of my experience in raising beans: Plant the
common small white bush bean about the first of June, in rows three
feet by eighteen inches apart, being careful to select fresh round and
unmixed seed. First look out for worms, and supply vacancies by
planting anew. Then look out for woodchucks, if it is an exposed
place, for they will nibble off the earliest tender leaves almost
clean as they go; and again, when the young tendrils make their
appearance, they have notice of it, and will shear them off with
both buds and young pods, sitting erect like a squirrel. But above all
harvest as early as possible, if you would escape frosts and have a
fair and salable crop; you may save much loss by this means.
This further experience also I gained: I said to myself, I will
not plant beans and corn with so much industry another summer, but
such seeds, if the seed is not lost, as sincerity, truth,
simplicity, faith, innocence, and the like, and see if they will not
grow in this soil, even with less toil and manurance, and sustain
me, for surely it has not been exhausted for these crops. Alas! I said
this to myself; but now another summer is gone, and another, and
another, and I am obliged to say to you, Reader, that the seeds
which I planted, if indeed they were the seeds of those virtues,
were wormeaten or had lost their vitality, and so did not come up.
Commonly men will only be brave as their fathers were brave, or timid.
This generation is very sure to plant corn and beans each new year
precisely as the Indians did centuries ago and taught the first
settlers to do, as if there were a fate in it. I saw an old man the
other day, to my astonishment, making the holes with a hoe for the
seventieth time at least, and not for himself to lie down in! But
why should not the New Englander try new adventures, and not lay so
much stress on his grain, his potato and grass crop, and his orchards-
raise other crops than these? Why concern ourselves so much about
our beans for seed, and not be concerned at all about a new generation
of men? We should really be fed and cheered if when we met a man we
were sure to see that some of the qualities which I have named,
which we all prize more than those other productions, but which are
for the most part broadcast and floating in the air, had taken root
and grown in him. Here comes such a subtile and ineffable quality, for
instance, as truth or justice, though the slightest amount or new
variety of it, along the road. Our ambassadors should be instructed to
send home such seeds as these, and Congress help to distribute them
over all the land. We should never stand upon ceremony with sincerity.
We should never cheat and insult and banish one another by our
meanness, if there were present the kernel of worth and
friendliness. We should not meet thus in haste. Most men I do not meet
at all, for they seem not to have time; they are busy about their
beans. We would not deal with a man thus plodding ever, leaning on a
hoe or a spade as a staff between his work, not as a mushroom, but
partially risen out of the earth, something more than erect, like
swallows alighted and walking on the ground:
"And as he spake, his mings would now and then
Spread, as he meant to fly, then close again-"
so that we should suspect that we might be conversing with an angel.
Bread may not always nourish us; but it always does us good, it even
takes stiffness out of our joints, and makes us supple and buoyant,
when we knew not what ailed us, to recognize any generosity in man
or Nature, to share any unmixed and heroic joy.
Ancient poetry and mythology suggest, at least, that husbandry was
once a sacred art; but it is pursued with irreverent haste and
heedlessness by us, our object being to have large farms and large
crops merely. We have no festival, nor procession, nor ceremony, not
excepting our cattle-shows and so-called Thanksgivings, by which the
farmer expresses a sense of the sacredness of his calling, or is
reminded of its sacred origin. It is the premium and the feast which
tempt him. He sacrifices not to Ceres and the Terrestrial Jove, but to
the infernal Plutus rather. By avarice and selfishness, and a
grovelling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil
as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape
is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the
meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber. Cato says that
the profits of agriculture are particularly pious or just (maximeque
pius quaestus), and according to Varro the old Romans "called the same
earth Mother and Ceres, and thought that they who cultivated it led
a pious and useful life, and that they alone were left of the race
of King Saturn."
We are wont to forget that the sun looks on our cultivated fields
and on the prairies and forests without distinction. They all
reflect and absorb his rays alike, and the former make but a small
part of the glorious picture which he beholds in his daily course.
In his view the earth is all equally cultivated like a garden.
Therefore we should receive the benefit of his light and beat with a
corresponding trust and magnanimity. What though I value the seed of
these beans, and harvest that in the fall of the year? This broad
field which I have looked at so long looks not to me as the
principal cultivator, but away from me to influences more genial to
it, which water and make it green. These beans have results which
are not harvested by me. Do they not grow for woodchucks partly? The
ear of wheat (in Latin spica, obsoletely speca, from spe, hope) should
not be the only hope of the husbandman; its kernel or grain (granum
from gerendo, bearing) is not all that it bears. How, then, can our
harvest fail? Shall I not rejoice also at the abundance of the weeds
whose seeds are the granary of the birds? It matters little
comparatively whether the fields fill the farmer's barns. The true
husbandman will cease from anxiety, as the squirrels manifest no
concern whether the woods will bear chestnuts this year or not, and
finish his labor with every day, relinquishing all claim to the
produce of his fields, and sacrificing in his mind not only his
first but his last fruits also.
THE VILLAGE
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