ition. Ay! there was the rub. The old and infirm and
the timid, of whatever age or sex, thought most of sickness, and sudden
accident and death; to them life seemed full of danger--what danger is
there if you don't think of any?--and they thought that a prudent man
would carefully select the safest position, where Dr. B. might be
on hand at a moment's warning. To them the village was literally a
community, a league for mutual defence, and you would suppose that they
would not go a-huckleberrying without a medicine chest. The amount of
it is, if a man is alive, there is always danger that he may die,
though the danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is
dead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs.
Finally, there were the self-styled reformers, the greatest bores of
all, who thought that I was forever singing,--

This is the house that I built;
This is the man that lives in the house that I built;

but they did not know that the third line was,

These are the folks that worry the man
That lives in the house that I built.

I did not fear the hen-harriers, for I kept no chickens; but I feared
the men-harriers rather.

I had more cheering visitors than the last. Children come a-berrying,
railroad men taking a Sunday morning walk in clean shirts, fishermen and
hunters, poets and philosophers; in short, all honest pilgrims, who came
out to the woods for freedom's sake, and really left the village behind,
I was ready to greet with--"Welcome, Englishmen! welcome, Englishmen!"
for I had had communication with that race.

The Bean-Field

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 th