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, circulatiher from mouth to mouth, or from neer to
neer, 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 dire from my
house there was a y of muskrats in the river meadows; uhe
grove of elms and buttonwoods iher 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, or running over to a neighbors
to gossip. I went there frequently to observe their habits. The
village appeared to me a great news room; and on one side, to
support it, as o Redding & panys on State Street, they
kept nuts and raisins, or salt and meal and roceries. Some
have such a vast appetite for the former odity, that is, the
news, and such sound digestive ans, that they sit forever in
public avenues without stirring, a simmer and whisper
through them like the Etesian winds, or as if inhaliher, it
only produg numbness and insensibility to pain -- otherwise it
would often be painful to bear -- without affeg the
sciousness. I hardly ever failed, when I rambled through the
village, to see a row of such worthies, either sitting on a ladder
sunning themselves, with their bodies ined forward and their
eyes glang along the lihis way and that, from time to time,
with a voluptuous expression, or else leaning against a barn with
their hands in their pockets, like caryatides, as if to prop it up.
They, being only out of doors, heard whatever was in the wind.
These are the coarsest mills, in which all gossip is first rudely
digested or cracked up before it is emptied into finer and more
delicate hoppers within doors. I observed that the vitals of the
village were the grocery, the bar-room, the post-office, and the
bank; and, as a necessary part of the maery, they kept a bell, a
big gun, and a fire-e ve places; and the houses
were sed as to make the most of mankind, in lanes and
fronting one another, so that every traveller had to run the
gau, and every man, woman, and child might get a lick at him.
Of course, those who were stationed o the head of the line,
where they could most see and be seen, and have the first blow at
him, paid the highest prices for their places; and the few
straggling inhabitants iskirts, where long gaps in the line
began to occur, and the traveller could get over walls or turn aside
into cow-paths, and so escape, paid a very slight ground or window
tax. Signs were hung out on all sides to allure him; some to catch
him by the appetite, as the tavern and victualling cellar; some by
the fancy, as the dry goods store and the jewellers; and others b