l 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 Rans 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