ddlesex towns?--a
bald, staring town-house, or meeting-house, and a bare liberty-pole,
as leafless as it is fruitless, for all I can see. We shall be obliged
to import the timber for the last, hereafter, or splice such sticks as
we have;--and our ideas of liberty are equally mean with these. The
very willow-rows lopped every three years for fuel or powder,--and
every sizable pine and oak, or other forest tree, cut down within the
memory of man! As if individual speculators were to be allowed to
export the clouds out of the sky, or the stars out of the firmament,
one by one. We shall be reduced to gnaw the very crust of the earth
for nutriment.

They have even descended to smaller game. They have lately, as I hear,
invented a machine for chopping up huckleberry-bushes fine, and so
converting them into fuel!--bushes which, for fruit alone, are worth
all the pear-trees in the country many times over. (I can give you a
list of the three best kinds, if you want it.) At this rate, we shall
all be obliged to let our beards grow at least, if only to hide the
nakedness of the land and make a sylvan appearance. The farmer
sometimes talks of "brushing up," simply as if bare ground looked
better than clothed ground, than that which wears its natural
vesture,--as if the wild hedges, which, perhaps, are more to his
children than his whole farm beside, were _dirt_. I know of one
who deserves to be called the Tree-hater, and, perhaps, to leave this
for a new patronymic to his children. You would think that he had
been warned by an oracle that he would be killed by the fall of a
tree, and so was resolved to anticipate them. The journalists think
that they cannot say too much in favor of such "improvements" in
husbandry; it is a safe theme, like piety; but as for the beauty of
one of these "model farms," I would as lief see a patent churn and a
man turning it. They are, commonly, places merely where somebody is
making money, it may be counterfeiting. The virtue of making two
blades of grass grow where only one grew before does not begin to be
superhuman.

Nevertheless, it was a relief to get back to our smooth, but still
varied landscape. For a permanent residence, it seemed to me that
there could be no comparison between this and the wilderness,
necessary as the latter is for a resource and a background, the raw
material of all our civilization. The wilderness is simple, almost to
barrenness. The partially cultivated country it is wh