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 considerably before the latest were in the
ground; indeed they were not easily to be put off. What was the
meaning of this so steady and self-respecting, 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 cinquefoil,
blackberries, johnswort, and the like, before, sweet wild fruits and
pleasant flowers, produce instead this pulse. What shall I learn of
beans or beans of me? I cherish them, I hoe them, early and late I
have an eye to 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 and effete. My enemies are worms, cool days,
and most of all woodchucks. The last have nibbled for me a quarter
of an acre clean. But what right had I to oust johnswort and the
rest, and break up their ancient 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 scenes stamped on
my memory. And now to-night my flute has waked the echoes over that
very water. The pines still 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 presence and influence is seen in these bean leaves, corn
blades, and potato vines.
I planted about two acres and a half of upland; and as it was
only about fifteen years since the 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 an extinct nation had
anciently dwelt here and planted corn 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 morning 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, pacing slowly backward and forward over that yellow gravelly
upland, between the long green rows, fifteen rods, the one end
terminating 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. Colemans
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 all dells and pond-holes in the
woods and pastures and swamps grows a rich and various crop only
unreaped by man. Mine was, as it were, the connecting link between
wild and cultivated fields; as some states are civilized, and others
half-civilized, and others savage or barbarous, so my field was,
though not in a bad sense, a half-cultivated field. They were beans
cheerfully returning to their wild and primitive state that I
cultivated, and my hoe played the Rans des Vaches for them.
Near at hand, upon the topmost spray of a birch, sings the brown
thrasher -- or red mavis, as some love to call him -- all the
morning, glad of your society, that would find out another farmers
field if yours were not here. While you are planting the seed, he
cries -- "Drop it, drop it -- cover it up, cover it up -- pull it
up, pull it up, pull it up." But this was not corn, and so it was
safe from such enemies as he. You may wonder what his rigmarole,
his amateur Paganini performances on one string or on twenty, have
to do with your planting, and yet prefer it to leached ashes or
plaster. It was a cheap sort of top dressing in which I had entire
faith.
As I drew a still fresher soil about the rows with my hoe, I
disturbed the ashes of unchronicled nations who in primeval years
lived under these heavens, and their small implements of war and
hunting were brought to the light of this modern day. They lay
mingled with other natural stones, some of which bore the marks of
having been burned by Indian fires, and some by the sun, and also
bits of pottery and glass brought hither by the recent cultivators
of the soil. When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music
echoed to the woods and the sky, and was an accompaniment to my
labor which yielded an instant and immeasurable crop. It was no
longer beans that I hoed, nor I that hoed beans; and I remembered
with as much pity as pride, if I remembered at all, my acquaintances
who had gone to the city to attend the oratorios. The nighthawk
circled overhead in the sunny afternoons -- for I sometimes made a
day of it -- like a mote in the eye, or in heavens eye, falling
from time to time with a swoop and a sound as if the heavens were
rent, torn at last to very rags and tatters, and yet a seamless cope
remained; small imps that fill the air and lay their eggs on the
ground on bare sand or rocks on the tops of hills, where few have
found them; graceful and slender like ripples caught up from the
pond, as leaves are raised by the wind to float in the heavens; such
kindredship is in nature. The hawk is aerial brother of the wave
which he sails over and surveys, those his perfect air-inflated
wings answering to the elemental unfledged pinions of the sea. Or
sometimes I watched a pair of hen-hawks circling high in the sky,
alternately soaring and descending, approaching, and leaving one
another, as if they were the embodiment of my own thoughts. Or I
was attracted by the passage of wild pigeons from this wood to that,
with a slight quivering winnowing sound and carrier haste; or from
under a rotten stump my hoe turned up a sluggish portentous and
outlandish spotted salamander, a trace of Egypt and the Nile, yet
our contemporary. When I paused to lean on my hoe, these sounds and
sights I heard and saw anywhere in the row, a part of the
inexhaustible entertainment which the country offers.
On gala days the town fires its great guns, which echo like
popguns to these woods, and some waifs of martial music occasionally
penetrate thus far. To me, away there in my bean-field at the other
end of the town, the big guns sounded as if a puffball had burst;
and when there was a military turnout of which I was ignorant, I
have sometimes had a vague sense all the day of some sort of itching
and disease in the horizon, as if some eruption would break out
there soon, either scarlatina or canker-rash, until at length some
more favorable puff of wind, making haste over the fields and up the
Wayland road, brought me information of the "trainers." It seemed
by the distant hum as if somebodys bees had swarmed, and that the
neighbors, according to Virgils advice, by a faint tintinnabulum
upon the most sonorous of their domestic utensils, were endeavoring
to call them down into the hive again. And when the sound died
quite away, and the hum had ceased, and the most favorable breezes
told no tale, I knew that they had got the last drone of them all
safely into the Middlesex hive, and that now their minds were bent
on the honey with which it was smeared.
I felt proud to know that the liberties of Massachusetts and of
our fatherland were in such safe keeping; and as I turned to my
hoeing again I was filled with an inexpressible confidence, and
pursued my labor cheerfully with a calm trust in the future.
When there were several bands of musicians, it sounded as if all
the village was a vast bellows and all the buildings expanded and
collapsed alternately with a din. But sometimes it was a really
noble and inspiring strain that reached these woods, and the trumpet
that sings of fame, and I felt as if I could spit a Mexican with a
good relish -- for why should we always stand for trifles? -- and
looked round for a woodchuck or a skunk to exercise my chivalry
upon. These martial strains seemed as far away as Palestine, and
reminded me of a march of crusaders in the horizon, with a slight
tantivy and tremulous motion of the elm tree tops which overhang the
village. This was one of the great days; though the sky had from my
clearing only the same everlastingly great look that it wears daily,
and I saw no difference in it.
It was a singular experience that long acquaintance which I
cultivated with beans, what with planting, and hoeing, and
harvesting, and threshing, and picking over and selling them -- the
last was the hardest of all -- I might add eating, for I did taste.
I was determined to know beans. When they were growing, I used to
hoe from five oclock in the morning till noon, and commonly spent
the rest of the day about other affairs. Consider the intimate and
curious acquaintance one makes with various kinds of weeds -- it
will bear some iteration in the account, for there was no little
iteration in the labor -- disturbing their delicate organizations so
ruthlessly, and making such invidious distinctions with his hoe,
levelling whole ranks of one species, and sedulously cultivating
another. Thats Roman wormwood -- thats pigweed -- thats sorrel
-- thats piper-grass -- have at him, chop him up, turn his roots
upward to the sun, dont let him have a fibre in the shade, if you
do hell turn himself t other side up and be as green as a leek in
two days. A long war, not with cranes, but with weeds, those
Trojans who had sun and rain and dews on their side. Daily the
beans saw me come to their rescue armed with a hoe, and thin the
ranks of their enemies, filling up the trenches with weedy dead.
Many a lusty crest -- waving Hector, that towered a whole foot above
his crowding comrades, fell before my weapon and rolled in the dust.
Those summer days which some of my contemporaries devoted to the
fine arts in Boston or Rome, and others to contemplation in India,
and others to trade in London or New York, I thus, with the other
farmers of New England, devoted to husbandry. Not that I wanted
beans to eat, for I am by nature a Pythagorean, so far as beans are
concerned, whether they mean porridge or voting, and exchanged them
for rice; but, perchance, as some must work in fields if only for
the sake of tropes and expression, to serve a parable-maker one day.
It was on the whole a rare amusement, which, continued too long,
might have become a dissipation. Though I gave them no manure, and
did not hoe them all once, I hoed them unusualy well as far as I
went, and was paid for it in the end, "there being in truth," as
Evelyn says, "no compost or laetation whatsoever comparable to this
continual motion, repastination, and turning of the mould with the
spade." "The earth," he adds elsewhere, "especially if fresh, has a
certain magnetism in it, by which it attracts the salt, power, or
virtue (call it either) which gives it life, and is the logic of all
the labor and stir we keep about it, to sustain us; all dungings and
other sordid temperings being but the vicars succedaneous to this
improvement." Moreover, this being one of those "worn-out and
exhausted lay fields which enjoy their sabbath," had perchance, as
Sir Kenelm Digby thinks likely, attracted "vital spirits" from the
air. I harvested twelve bushels of beans.
But to be more particular, for it is complained that Mr. Coleman
has reported chiefly the expensive experiments of gentlemen farmers,
my outgoes were,--
For a hoe ................................... $ 0.54
Plowing, harrowing, and furrowing ............ 7.50 Too much.
Beans for seed ............................... 3.12+
Potatoes for seed ............................ 1.33
Peas for seed ................................ 0.40
Turnip seed .................................. 0.06
White line for crow fence .................... 0.02
Horse cultivator and boy three hours ......... 1.00
Horse and cart to get crop ................... 0.75
--------
In all .................................. $14.72+
My income was (patrem familias vendacem, non emacem esse
oportet), from
Nine bushels and twelve quarts of beans sold .. $16.94
Five"large potatoes ..................... 2.50
Nine"small .............................. 2.25
Grass ........................................... 1.00
Stalks .......................................... 0.75
-------
In all .................................... $23.44
Leaving a pecuniary profit,
as I have elsewhere said, of .............. $ 8.71+
This is the result of my experience in raising beans: Plant the
common small white bush bean about the first of June, in rows three
feet by eighteen inches apart, being careful to select fresh round
and unmixed seed. First look out for worms, and supply vacancies by
planting anew. Then look out for woodchucks, if it is an exposed
place, for they will nibble off the earliest tender leaves almost
clean as they go; and again, when the young tendrils make their
appearance, they have notice of it, and will shear them off with
both buds and young pods, sitting erect like a squirrel. But above
all harvest as early as possible, if you would escape frosts and
have a fair and salable crop; you may save much loss by this means.
This further experience also I gained: I said to myself, I will
not plant beans and corn with so much industry another summer, but
such seeds, if the seed is not lost, as sincerity, truth,
simplicity, faith, innocence, and the like, and see if they will not
grow in this soil, even with less toil and manurance, and sustain
me, for surely it has not been exhausted for these crops. Alas! I
said this to myself; but now another summer is gone, and another,
and another, and I am obliged to say to you, Reader, that the seeds
which I planted, if indeed they were the seeds of those virtues,
were wormeaten or had lost their vitality, and so did not come up.
Commonly men will only be brave as their fathers were brave, or
timid. This generation is very sure to plant corn and beans each
new year precisely as the Indians did centuries ago and taught the
first settlers to do, as if there were a fate in it. I saw an old
man the other day, to my astonishment, making the holes with a hoe
for the seventieth time at least, and not for himself to lie down
in! But why should not the New Englander try new adventures, and
not lay so much stress on his grain, his potato and grass crop, and
his orchards -- raise other crops than these? Why concern ourselves
so much about our beans for seed, and not be concerned at all about
a new generation of men? We should really be fed and cheered if
when we met a man we were sure to see that some of the qualities
which I have named, which we all prize more than those other
productions, but which are for the most part broadcast and floating
in the air, had taken root and grown in him. Here comes such a
subtile and ineffable quality, for instance, as truth or justice,
though the slightest amount or new variety of it, along the road.
Our ambassadors should be instructed to send home such seeds as
these, and Congress help to distribute them over all the land. We
should never stand upon ceremony with sincerity. We should never
cheat and insult and banish one another by our meanness, if there
were present the kernel of worth and friendliness. We should not
meet thus in haste. Most men I do not meet at all, for they seem
not to have time; they are busy about their beans. We would not
deal with a man thus plodding ever, leaning on a hoe or a spade as a
staff between his work, not as a mushroom, but partially risen out
of the earth, something more than erect, like swallows alighted and
walking on the ground:--
"And as he spake, his wings would now and then
Spread, as he meant to fly, then close again --"
so that we should suspect that we might be conversing with an angel.
Bread may not always nourish us; but it always does us good, it even
takes stiffness out of our joints, and makes us supple and buoyant,
when we knew not what ailed us, to recognize any generosity in man
or Nature, to share any unmixed and heroic joy.
Ancient poetry and mythology suggest, at least, that husbandry
was once a sacred art; but it is pursued with irreverent haste and
heedlessness by us, our object being to have large farms and large
crops merely. We have no festival, nor procession, nor ceremony,
not excepting our cattle-shows and so-called Thanksgivings, by which
the farmer expresses a sense of the sacredness of his calling, or is
reminded of its sacred origin. It is the premium and the feast
which tempt him. He sacrifices not to Ceres and the Terrestrial
Jove, but to the infernal Plutus rather. By avarice and
selfishness, and a grovelling habit, from which none of us is free,
of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring
property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded
with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature
but as a robber. Cato says that the profits of agriculture are
particularly pious or just (maximeque pius quaestus), and according
to Varro the old Romans "called the same earth Mother and Ceres, and
thought that they who cultivated it led a pious and useful life, and
that they alone were left of the race of King Saturn."
We are wont to forget that the sun looks on our cultivated
fields and on the 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 farmers 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.