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
altern