prairies and forests without distinction. They all reflect and
absorb his rays alike, and the former make but a small part of the
glorious picture which he beholds in his daily course. In his view
the earth is all equally cultivated like a garden. Therefore we should
receive the benefit of his light and heat with a corresponding trust and
magnanimity. What though I value the seed of these beans, and harvest
that in the fall of the year? This broad field which I have looked at
so long looks not to me as the principal cultivator, but away from me to
influences more genial to it, which water and make it green. These
beans have results which are not harvested by me. Do they not grow for
woodchucks partly? The ear of wheat (in Latin spica, obsoletely speca,
from spe, hope) should not be the only hope of the husbandman; its
kernel or grain (granum from gerendo, bearing) is not all that it
bears. How, then, can our harvest fail? Shall I not rejoice also at
the abundance of the weeds whose seeds are the granary of the birds? It
matters little comparatively whether the fields fill the farmer's barns.
The true husbandman will cease from anxiety, as the squirrels manifest
no concern whether the woods will bear chestnuts this year or not, and
finish his labor with every day, relinquishing all claim to the produce
of his fields, and sacrificing in his mind not only his first but his
last fruits also.

The Village

After hoeing, or perhaps reading and writing, in the forenoon, I usually
bathed again in the pond, swimming across one of its coves for a stint,
and washed the dust of labor from my person, or smoothed out the last
wrinkle which study had made, and for the afternoon was absolutely free.
Every day or two I strolled to the village to hear some of the gossip
which is incessantly going on there, circulating either from mouth to
mouth, or from newspaper to newspaper, and which, taken in homoeopathic
doses, was really as refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves and
the peeping of frogs. As I walked in the woods to see the birds and
squirrels, so I walked in the village to see the men and boys; instead
of the wind among the pines I heard the carts rattle. In one direction
from my house there was a colony of muskrats in the river meadows; under
the grove of elms and buttonwoods in the other horizon was a village
of busy men, as curious to me as if they had been prairie-dogs, each
sitting at the mouth of its burrow, o