n my farm on shares
with the whole universe--fox and hawk, dry weather and wet, summer and
winter. I believe there is a great deal more to farming than mere
beans. I 'm going to raise birds and beasts as well. I 'm going to
cultivate everything, from my stone-piles up to the stars."

He looked me over. I had not been long out from the city. Then he
said, thinking doubtless of my stone-piles:--

"Professor, you 've bought a mighty rich piece of land. And it's just
as you say; there's more to farmin' than beans. But, as I see it,
beans are beans anyway you cook 'em; and I think, if I was you, I would
hang on a while yet to my talkin' job in the city."

It was sound advice. I have a rich farm. I have raised beans that
were beans, and I have raised birds, besides, and beasts,--a perfectly
enormous crop of woodchucks; I have cultivated everything up to the
stars; but I find it necessary to hang on a while yet to my talkin' job
in the city.

Nevertheless, Joel is fundamentally wrong about the beans, for beans
are not necessarily beans any way you cook them, nor are beans mere
beans any way you grow them--not if I remember Thoreau and my extensive
ministerial experience with bean suppers.

As for growing mere beans--listen to Thoreau. He is out in his patch
at Walden.

"When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to the woods
and the sky, and was an accompaniment to my labor which yielded an
instant and immeasurable crop. It was no longer beans that I hoed, nor
I that hoed beans."

Who was it, do you suppose, that hoed? And, if not beans, what was it
that he hoed? Well, poems for one thing, prose poems. If there is a
more delightful chapter in American literature than that one in Walden
on the bean-patch, I don't know which chapter it is. That patch was
made to yield more than beans. The very stones were made to tinkle
till their music sounded on the sky.

"As _I_ see it, beans are beans," said Joel. And so they are, as he
sees them.

Is not the commonplaceness, the humdrumness, the dead-levelness, of
life largely a matter of individual vision, "as I see it"?

Take farm life, for instance, and how it is typified in my neighbor!
how it is epitomized, too, and really explained in his "beans are
beans"! He raises beans; she cooks beans; they eat beans. Life is
pretty much all beans. If "beans are beans," why, how much more is
life?

He runs his farm on halves with the soil, and the