Meanwhile my beans, the length of whose rows, added together,
was seven miles already planted, were impatient to be hoed, for the
earliest had grown siderably before the latest were in the
ground; ihey were not easily to be put off. What was the
meaning of this so steady and self-respeg, this small Herculean
labor, I knew not. I came to love my rows, my beans, though so many
more than I wanted. They attached me to the earth, and so I got
strength like Antaeus. But why should I raise them? Only Heaven
knows. This was my curious labor all summer -- to make this portion
of the earths surface, which had yielded only quefoil,
blackberries, johnswort, and the like, before, sweet wild fruits and
pleasant flowers, produstead this pulse. What shall I learn of
beans or beans of me? I cherish them, I hoe them, early and late I
have ao them; and this is my days work. It is a fine broad
leaf to look on. My auxiliaries are the dews and rains which water
this dry soil, and what fertility is in the soil itself, which for
the most part is lean ae. My enemies are worms, cool days,
and most of all woodchucks. The last have nibbled for me a quarter
of an acre . But what right had I to oust johnswort and the
rest, and break up their a herb garden? Soon, however, the
remaining beans will be too tough for them, and go forward to meet
new foes.
When I was four years old, as I well remember, I was brought
from Boston to this my native town, through these very woods and
this field, to the pond. It is one of the oldest ses stamped on
my memory. And now to-night my flute has waked the echoes over that
very water. The piill stand here older than I; or, if some
have fallen, I have cooked my supper with their stumps, and a new
growth is rising all around, preparing another aspect for new infant
eyes. Almost the same johnswort springs from the same perennial
root in this pasture, and even I have at length helped to clothe
that fabulous landscape of my infant dreams, and one of the results
of my presend influence is seen in these bean leaves,
blades, and potato vines.
I planted about two acres and a half of upland; and as it was
only about fifteen years sihe land was cleared, and I myself
had got out two or three cords of stumps, I did not give it any
manure; but in the course of the summer it appeared by the
arrowheads which I turned up in hoeing, that aination had
aly dwelt here and planted and beans ere white men came
to clear the land, and so, to some extent, had exhausted the soil
for this very crop.
Before yet any woodchuck or squirrel had run across the road, or
the sun had got above the shrub oaks, while all the dew was on,
though the farmers warned me against it -- I would advise you to do
all your work if possible while the dew is on -- I began to level
the ranks of haughty weeds in my bean-field and throw dust upon
their heads. Early in the m I worked barefooted, dabbling
like a plastic artist in the dewy and crumbling sand, but later in
the day the sun blistered my feet. There the sun lighted me to hoe
beans, pag slowly backward and forward over that yellow gravelly
upland, between the long green rows, fifteen rods, the one end