in a shrub oak copse where I
could rest in the shade, the other in a blackberry field where the
green berries deepened their tints by the time I had made another
bout. Removing the weeds, putting fresh soil about the bean stems, and
encouraging this weed which I had sown, making the yellow soil express
its summer thought in bean leaves and blossoms rather than in wormwood
and piper and millet grass, making the earth say beans instead of
grass--this was my daily work. As I had little aid from horses or
cattle, or hired men or boys, or improved implements of husbandry, I was
much slower, and became much more intimate with my beans than usual.
But labor of the hands, even when pursued to the verge of drudgery,
is perhaps never the worst form of idleness. It has a constant and
imperishable moral, and to the scholar it yields a classic result. A
very agricola laboriosus was I to travellers bound westward through
Lincoln and Wayland to nobody knows where; they sitting at their ease in
gigs, with elbows on knees, and reins loosely hanging in festoons; I the
home-staying, laborious native of the soil. But soon my homestead was
out of their sight and thought. It was the only open and cultivated
field for a great distance on either side of the road, so they made the
most of it; and sometimes the man in the field heard more of travellers'
gossip and comment than was meant for his ear: "Beans so late! peas
so late!"--for I continued to plant when others had begun to hoe--the
ministerial husbandman had not suspected it. "Corn, my boy, for fodder;
corn for fodder." "Does he live there?" asks the black bonnet of the
gray coat; and the hard-featured farmer reins up his grateful dobbin to
inquire what you are doing where he sees no manure in the furrow, and
recommends a little chip dirt, or any little waste stuff, or it may be
ashes or plaster. But here were two acres and a half of furrows, and
only a hoe for cart and two hands to draw it--there being an aversion
to other carts and horses--and chip dirt far away. Fellow-travellers as
they rattled by compared it aloud with the fields which they had passed,
so that I came to know how I stood in the agricultural world. This was
one field not in Mr. Coleman's report. And, by the way, who estimates
the value of the crop which nature yields in the still wilder fields
unimproved by man? The crop of English hay is carefully weighed, the
moisture calculated, the silicates and the potash; but in al