op. 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 top of hills, where
few have found them; graceful and slender like ripples
caught up from the pond, as leaves 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 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.

All this is in his best style. Who, after reading it, does not long
for a bean-field? In planting it, too what music attends him!

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 as