Chapter 8

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, or running over to a neighbor's
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 once at Redding & Company's on State Street, they
kept nuts and raisins, or salt and meal and other groceries. Some
have such a vast appetite for the former commodity, that is, the
news, and such sound digestive organs, that they can sit forever in
public avenues without stirring, and let it simmer and whisper
through them like the Etesian winds, or as if inhaling ether, it
only producing numbness and insensibility to pain -- otherwise it
would often be painful to bear -- without affecting the
consciousness. 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 inclined forward and their
eyes glancing along the line this 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 commonly 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 machinery, they kept a bell, a
big gun, and a fire-engine, at convenient places; and the houses
were so arranged as to make the most of mankind, in lanes and
fronting one another, so that every traveller had to run the
gauntlet, and every man, woman, and child