w John Starkweather; but I thought to myself as
I have thought so many times how surely one comes finally to imitate his
surroundings. A farmer grows to be a part of his farm; the sawdust on
his coat is not the most distinctive insignia of the carpenter; the poet
writes his truest lines upon his own countenance. People passing in my
road take me to be a part of this natural scene. I suppose I seem to
them as a partridge squatting among dry grass and leaves, so like the
grass and leaves as to be invisible. We all come to be marked upon by
nature and dismissed--how carelessly!--as genera or species. And is it
not the primal struggle of man to escape classification, to form new
differentiations?

Sometimes--I confess it--when I see one passing in my road, I feel like
hailing him and saying:

"Friend, I am not all farmer. I, too, am a person; I am different and
curious. I am full of red blood, I like people, all sorts of people; if
you are not interested in me, at least I am intensely interested in you.
Come over now and let's talk!"

So we are all of us calling and calling across the incalculable gulfs
which separate us even from our nearest friends!

Once or twice this feeling has been so real to me that I've been near
to the point of hailing utter strangers--only to be instantly overcome
with a sense of the humorous absurdity of such an enterprise. So I laugh
it off and I say to myself:

"Steady now: the man is going to town to sell a pig; he is coming back
with ten pounds of sugar, five of salt pork, a can of coffee and some
new blades for his mowing machine. He hasn't time for talk"--and so I
come down with a bump to my digging, or hoeing, or chopping, or whatever
it is.

----Here I've left John Starkweather in my pasture while I remark to
the extent of a page or two that I didn't expect him to see me when he
went by.

I assumed that he was out for a walk, perhaps to enliven a worn appetite
(do you know, confidentially, I've had some pleasure in times past in
reflecting upon the jaded appetites of millionnaires!), and that he
would pass out by my lane to the country road; but instead of that, what
should he do but climb the yard fence and walk over toward the barn
where I was at work.

Perhaps I was not consumed with excitement: here was fresh adventure!

"A farmer," I said to myself with exultation, "has only to wait long
enough and all the world comes his way."

I had just begun to grease my farm wagon a