ately 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
mea