Chapter 7 - Page 2

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