lost in the middle of the
prairie, and some worldly miser with a surveyor looking after his
bounds, while heaven had taken place around him, and he did not see the
angels going to and fro, but was looking for an old post-hole in the
midst of paradise. I looked again, and saw him standing in the middle of
a boggy, stygian fen, surrounded by devils, and he had found his bounds
without a doubt, three little stones, where a stake had been driven, and
looking nearer, I saw that the Prince of Darkness was his surveyor.

I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles, commencing
at my own door, without going by any house, without crossing a road
except where the fox and the mink do: first along by the river, and then
the brook, and then the meadow and the wood-side. There are square miles
in my vicinity which have no inhabitant. From many a hill I can see
civilization and the abodes of man afar. The farmers and their works are
scarcely more obvious than woodchucks and their burrows. Man and
his affairs, church and state and school, trade and commerce, and
manufactures and agriculture, even politics, the most alarming of
them all,--I am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the
landscape. Politics is but a narrow field, and that still narrower
highway yonder leads to it. I sometimes direct the traveller thither. If
you would go to the political world, follow the great road,--follow that
market-man, keep his dust in your eyes, and it will lead you straight to
it; for it, too, has its place merely, and does not occupy all space. I
pass from it as from a beanfield into the forest, and it is forgotten.
In one half-hour I can walk off to some portion of the earth's surface
where a man does not stand from one year's end to another, and there,
consequently, politics are not, for they are but as the cigar-smoke of a
man.

The village is the place to which the roads tend, a sort of expansion of
the highway, as a lake of a river. It is the body of which roads are
the arms and legs,--a trivial or quadrivial place, the thoroughfare
and ordinary of travellers. The word is from the Latin _villa_, which,
together with _via_, a way, or more anciently _ved_ and _vella_, Varro
derives from _veho_, to carry, because the villa is the place to and
from which things are carried. They who got their living by teaming were
said _vellaturam facere_. Hence, too, apparently, the Latin word _vilis_
and our vile; also _villain_. This