nt at the very
grandness and seriousness of it all. And I said aloud to myself:

"I will be as broad as the earth. I will not be limited."

Thus I was born into the present world, and here I continue, not knowing
what other world I may yet achieve. I do not know, but I wait in
expectancy, keeping my furrows straight and my corners well turned.
Since that day in the field, though my fences include no more acres, and
I still plow my own fields, my real domain has expanded until I crop
wide fields and take the profit of many curious pastures. From my farm I
can see most of the world; and if I wait here long enough all people
pass this way.

And I look out upon them not in the surroundings which they have chosen
for themselves, but from the vantage ground of my familiar world. The
symbols which meant so much in cities mean little here. Sometimes it
seems to me as though I saw men naked. They come and stand beside my
oak, and the oak passes solemn judgment; they tread my furrows and the
clods give silent evidence; they touch the green blades of my corn, the
corn whispers its sure conclusions. Stern judgments that will be
deceived by no symbols!

Thus I have delighted, secretly, in calling myself an unlimited farmer,
and I make this confession in answer to the inner and truthful demand of
the soul that we are not, after all, the slaves of things, whether corn,
or banknotes, or spindles; that we are not the used, but the users; that
life is more than profit and loss. And so I shall expect that while I am
talking farm some of you may be thinking dry goods, banking, literature,
carpentry, or what-not. But if you can say: I am an unlimited dry goods
merchant, I am an unlimited carpenter, I will give you an old-fashioned
country hand-shake, strong and warm. We are friends; our orbits
coincide.

II

I BUY A FARM

As I have said, when I came here I came as a renter, working all of the
first summer without that "open vision" of which the prophet Samuel
speaks. I had no memory of the past and no hope of the future. I fed
upon the moment. My sister Harriet kept the house and I looked after the
farm and the fields. In all those months I hardly knew that I had
neighbours, although Horace, from whom I rented my place, was not
infrequently a visitor. He has since said that I looked at him as though
he were a "statute." I was "citified," Horace said; and "citified" with
us here in the country is nearly the limit of invective,