did
not always know whether Jonas or Solomon worked in a particular
field to-day; that was none of my business. I have watered the red
huckleberry, the sand cherry and the nettle-tree, the red pine and
the black ash, the white grape and the yellow violet, which might have
withered else in dry seasons.

In short, I went on thus for a long time (I may say it without
boasting), faithfully minding my business, till it became more and more
evident that my townsmen would not after all admit me into the list of
town officers, nor make my place a sinecure with a moderate allowance.
My accounts, which I can swear to have kept faithfully, I have, indeed,
never got audited, still less accepted, still less paid and settled.
However, I have not set my heart on that.

Not long since, a strolling Indian went to sell baskets at the house
of a well-known lawyer in my neighborhood. "Do you wish to buy any
baskets?" he asked. "No, we do not want any," was the reply. "What!"
exclaimed the Indian as he went out the gate, "do you mean to starve
us?" Having seen his industrious white neighbors so well off--that
the lawyer had only to weave arguments, and, by some magic, wealth and
standing followed--he had said to himself: I will go into business; I
will weave baskets; it is a thing which I can do. Thinking that when he
had made the baskets he would have done his part, and then it would be
the white man's to buy them. He had not discovered that it was necessary
for him to make it worth the other's while to buy them, or at least make
him think that it was so, or to make something else which it would be
worth his while to buy. I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate
texture, but I had not made it worth any one's while to buy them. Yet
not the less, in my case, did I think it worth my while to weave them,
and instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy my
baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them.
The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why
should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?

Finding that my fellow-citizens were not likely to offer me any room in
the court house, or any curacy or living anywhere else, but I must shift
for myself, I turned my face more exclusively than ever to the woods,
where I was better known. I determined to go into business at once, and
not wait to acquire the usual capital, using such slender means as I had
already