chapter 7the bean-field meanwhile my beans, the length of whoserows, 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 andself-respecting, this small herculean labor, i knew not. i came to love my rows, my beans, though somany more than i wanted. they attached me to the earth, and so i gotstrength like antaeus. but why should i raise them?
only heaven knows. this was my curious labor all summer--tomake this portion of the earth's surface, which had yielded only cinquefoil,blackberries, johnswort, and the like, before, sweet wild fruits and pleasantflowers, produce instead this pulse. what shall i learn of beans or beans of me? i cherish them, i hoe them, early and latei have an eye to them; and this is my day's work.it is a fine broad leaf to look on. my auxiliaries are the dews and rains whichwater this dry soil, and what fertility is in the soil itself, which for the most partis lean and effete.
my enemies are worms, cool days, and mostof all woodchucks. the last have nibbled for me a quarter ofan acre clean. but what right had i to oust johnswort andthe rest, and break up their ancient herb garden? soon, however, the remaining beans will betoo tough for them, and go forward to meet new foes. when i was four years old, as i wellremember, i was brought from boston to this my native town, through these very woodsand this field, to the pond. it is one of the oldest scenes stamped onmy memory.
and now to-night my flute has waked theechoes 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 growthis rising all around, preparing another aspect for new infant eyes. almost the same johnswort springs from thesame perennial root in this pasture, and even i have at length helped to clothe thatfabulous 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 ofupland; and as it was only about fifteen
years since the land was cleared, and imyself 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 bythe arrowheads which i turned up in hoeing, that an extinct nation had anciently dwelthere and planted corn and beans ere white men came to clear the land, and so, to some extent, had exhausted the soil for thisvery crop. before yet any woodchuck or squirrel hadrun across the road, or the sun had got above the shrub oaks, while all the dew wason, 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 tolevel 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 daythe sun blistered my feet. there the sun lighted me to hoe beans,pacing slowly backward and forward over that yellow gravelly upland, between thelong green rows, fifteen rods, the one end terminating in a shrub oak copse where i could rest in the shade, the other in ablackberry field where the green berries deepened their tints by the time i had madeanother bout.
removing the weeds, putting fresh soilabout the bean stems, and encouraging this weed which i had sown, making the yellowsoil express its summer thought in bean leaves and blossoms rather than in wormwood and piper and millet grass, making theearth 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 pursuedto 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 totravellers bound westward through lincoln and wayland to nobody knows where; theysitting at their ease in gigs, with elbows on knees, and reins loosely hanging in festoons; i the home-staying, laboriousnative of the soil. but soon my homestead was out of theirsight and thought. it was the only open and cultivated fieldfor a great distance on either side of the
road, so they made the most of it; andsometimes the man in the field heard more of travellers' gossip and comment than was meant for his ear: "beans so late! peas solate!"--for i continued to plant when others had begun to hoe--the ministerialhusbandman had not suspected it. "corn, my boy, for fodder; corn forfodder." "does he live there?" asks the black bonnetof the gray coat; and the hard-featured farmer reins up his grateful dobbin toinquire what you are doing where he sees no manure in the furrow, and recommends a little chip dirt, or any little wastestuff, or it may be ashes or plaster.
but here were two acres and a half offurrows, and only a hoe for cart and two hands to draw it--there being an aversionto other carts and horses--and chip dirt far away. fellow-travellers as they rattled bycompared it aloud with the fields which they had passed, so that i came to know howi stood in the agricultural world. this was one field not in mr. coleman'sreport. and, by the way, who estimates the value ofthe crop which nature yields in the still wilder fields unimproved by man? the crop of english hay is carefullyweighed, the moisture calculated, the
silicates and the potash; but in all dellsand pond-holes in the woods and pastures and swamps grows a rich and various croponly unreaped by man. mine was, as it were, the connecting linkbetween 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 totheir wild and primitive state that i cultivated, and my hoe played the ranz desvaches for them. near at hand, upon the topmost spray of abirch, sings the brown thrasher--or red mavis, as some love to call him--all themorning, glad of your society, that would
find out another farmer's field if yourswere 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 safefrom such enemies as he. you may wonder what his rigmarole, hisamateur paganini performances on one string or on twenty, have to do with yourplanting, and yet prefer it to leached ashes or plaster. it was a cheap sort of top dressing inwhich i had entire faith. as i drew a still fresher soil about therows with my hoe, i disturbed the ashes of
unchronicled nations who in primeval yearslived under these heavens, and their small implements of war and hunting were broughtto 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 thesun, and also bits of pottery and glass brought hither by the recent cultivators ofthe soil. when my hoe tinkled against the stones,that music echoed to the woods and the sky, and was an accompaniment to my labor whichyielded an instant and immeasurable crop. it was no longer beans that i hoed, nor ithat 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 sunnyafternoons--for i sometimes made a day of it--like a mote in the eye, or in heaven'seye, 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, andyet a seamless cope remained; small imps that fill the air and lay their eggs on theground on bare sand or rocks on the tops of hills, where few have found them; graceful and slender like ripples caught up from thepond, as leaves are raised by the wind to float in the heavens; such kindredship isin nature.
the hawk is aerial brother of the wavewhich he sails over and surveys, those his perfect air-inflated wings answering to theelemental unfledged pinions of the sea. or sometimes i watched a pair of hen-hawkscircling high in the sky, alternately soaring and descending, approaching, andleaving one another, as if they were the embodiment of my own thoughts. or i was attracted by the passage of wildpigeons from this wood to that, with a slight quivering winnowing sound andcarrier haste; or from under a rotten stump my hoe turned up a sluggish portentous and outlandish spotted salamander, a trace ofegypt and the nile, yet our contemporary.
when i paused to lean on my hoe, thesesounds and sights i heard and saw anywhere in the row, a part of the inexhaustibleentertainment 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 occasionallypenetrate thus far. to me, away there in my bean-field at theother end of the town, the big guns sounded as if a puffball had burst; and when therewas a military turnout of which i was ignorant, i have sometimes had a vague sense all the day of some sort of itchingand disease in the horizon, as if some eruption would break out there soon, eitherscarlatina or canker-rash, until at length
some more favorable puff of wind, making haste over the fields and up the waylandroad, brought me information of the "trainers." it seemed by the distant hum as ifsomebody's bees had swarmed, and that the neighbors, according to virgil's advice, bya faint tintinnabulum upon the most sonorous of their domestic utensils, were endeavoring to call them down into the hiveagain. and when the sound died quite away, and thehum had ceased, and the most favorable breezes told no tale, i knew that they hadgot the last drone of them all safely into
the middlesex hive, and that now their minds were bent on the honey with which itwas smeared. i felt proud to know that the liberties ofmassachusetts and of our fatherland were in such safe keeping; and as i turned to myhoeing again i was filled with an inexpressible confidence, and pursued my labor cheerfully with a calm trust in thefuture. when there were several bands of musicians,it sounded as if all the village was a vast bellows and all the buildings expanded andcollapsed alternately with a din. but sometimes it was a really noble andinspiring strain that reached these woods,
and the trumpet that sings of fame, and ifelt as if i could spit a mexican with a good relish--for why should we always stand for trifles?--and looked round for awoodchuck or a skunk to exercise my chivalry upon. these martial strains seemed as far away aspalestine, and reminded me of a march of crusaders in the horizon, with a slighttantivy and tremulous motion of the elm tree tops which overhang the village. this was one of the great days; though thesky had from my clearing only the same everlastingly great look that it wearsdaily, and i saw no difference in it.
it was a singular experience that longacquaintance which i cultivated with beans, what with planting, and hoeing, andharvesting, and threshing, and picking over and selling them--the last was the hardest of all--i might add eating, for i didtaste. i was determined to know beans. when they were growing, i used to hoe fromfive o'clock in the morning till noon, and commonly spent the rest of the day aboutother affairs. consider the intimate and curiousacquaintance one makes with various kinds of weeds--it will bear some iteration inthe account, for there was no little
iteration in the labor--disturbing their delicate organizations so ruthlessly, andmaking such invidious distinctions with his hoe, levelling whole ranks of one species,and sedulously cultivating another. that's roman wormwood--that's pigweed--that's sorrel--that's piper-grass--have at him, chop him up, turn his roots upward tothe sun, don't let him have a fibre in the shade, if you do he'll turn himself t' other side up and be as green as a leek intwo days. a long war, not with cranes, but withweeds, those trojans who had sun and rain and dews on their side.
daily the beans saw me come to their rescuearmed with a hoe, and thin the ranks of their enemies, filling up the trenches withweedy dead. many a lusty crest--waving hector, thattowered a whole foot above his crowding comrades, fell before my weapon and rolledin the dust. those summer days which some of mycontemporaries devoted to the fine arts in boston or rome, and others to contemplationin india, and others to trade in london or new york, i thus, with the other farmers ofnew england, devoted to husbandry. not that i wanted beans to eat, for i am bynature a pythagorean, so far as beans are concerned, whether they mean porridge orvoting, 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 nothoe them all once, i hoed them unusually well as far as i went, and was paid for itin the end, "there being in truth," as evelyn says, "no compost or laetation whatsoever comparable to this continualmotion, repastination, and turning of the mould with the spade."
"the earth," he adds elsewhere, "especiallyif fresh, has a certain magnetism in it, by which it attracts the salt, power, orvirtue (call it either) which gives it life, and is the logic of all the labor and stir we keep about it, to sustain us; alldungings and other sordid temperings being but the vicars succedaneous to thisimprovement." moreover, this being one of those "worn-outand exhausted lay fields which enjoy their sabbath," had perchance, as sir kenelmdigby 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 reportedchiefly the expensive experiments of gentlemen farmers, my outgoes were,-- for a hoe........................$ 0.54plowing, harrowing, and furrowing........... 7.50too much. beans for seed................ 3.12-1/2 potatoes for seed................. 1.33peas for seed..................... 0.40 turnip seed....................... 0.06white line for crow fence......... 0.02 horse cultivator and boythree hours........ 1.00 horse and cart to get crop........ 0.75-------
in all...................$14.72-1/2 my income was (patrem familias vendacem,non emacem esse oportet), from nine bushels and twelve quartsof beans sold..............$16.94 five " large potatoes........2.50nine " small.................2.25 grass..............................1.00 stalks.............................0.75--------- in all........................ $23.44leaving a pecuniary profit, as i have elsewhere said, of.$8.71-1/2 this is the result of my experience inraising beans: plant the common small white
bush bean about the first of june, in rowsthree feet by eighteen inches apart, being careful to select fresh round and unmixedseed. first look out for worms, and supplyvacancies by planting anew. then look out for woodchucks, if it is anexposed place, for they will nibble off the earliest tender leaves almost clean as theygo; and again, when the young tendrils make their appearance, they have notice of it, and will shear them off with both buds andyoung 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 bythis means.
this further experience also i gained: isaid 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 theywill not grow in this soil, even with less toil and manurance, and sustain me, forsurely it has not been exhausted for these crops. alas! i said this to myself; but now anothersummer 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, andso did not come up. commonly men will only be brave as theirfathers were brave, or timid. this generation is very sure to plant cornand beans each new year precisely as the indians did centuries ago and taught thefirst settlers to do, as if there were a fate in it. i saw an old man the other day, to myastonishment, making the holes with a hoe for the seventieth time at least, and notfor himself to lie down in! but why should not the new englander trynew 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 ourbeans for seed, and not be concerned at all about a new generation of men? we should really be fed and cheered if whenwe met a man we were sure to see that some of the qualities which i have named, whichwe all prize more than those other productions, but which are for the most part broadcast and floating in the air, hadtaken root and grown in him. here comes such a subtile and ineffablequality, for instance, as truth or justice,
though the slightest amount or new varietyof it, along the road. our ambassadors should be instructed tosend 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 banishone another by our meanness, if there were present the kernel of worth andfriendliness. we should not meet thus in haste. most men i do not meet at all, for theyseem not to have time; they are busy about their beans.
we would not deal with a man thus ploddingever, 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 swallowsalighted and walking on the ground:-- "and as he spake, his wings would now andthen spread, as he meant to fly, then close again--" so that we should suspect that wemight be conversing with an angel. bread may not always nourish us; but italways does us good, it even takes stiffness out of our joints, and makes ussupple and buoyant, when we knew not what ailed us, to recognize any generosity in man or nature, to share any unmixed andheroic joy.
ancient poetry and mythology suggest, atleast, that husbandry was once a sacred art; but it is pursued with irreverenthaste and heedlessness by us, our object being to have large farms and large cropsmerely. we have no festival, nor procession, norceremony, not excepting our cattle-shows and so-called thanksgivings, by which thefarmer expresses a sense of the sacredness of his calling, or is reminded of itssacred origin. it is the premium and the feast which tempthim. he sacrifices not to ceres and theterrestrial jove, but to the infernal plutus rather.
by avarice and selfishness, and agrovelling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, orthe means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads themeanest of lives. he knows nature but as a robber. cato says that the profits of agricultureare particularly pious or just (maximeque pius quaestus), and according to varro theold 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 onour 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 hisdaily course. in his view the earth is all equallycultivated like a garden. therefore we should receive the benefit ofhis light and heat with a corresponding trust and magnanimity. what though i value the seed of thesebeans, and harvest that in the fall of the
year? this broad field which i have looked at solong looks not to me as the principal cultivator, but away from me to influencesmore genial to it, which water and make it green. these beans have results which are notharvested 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; itskernel 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 ofthe birds? it matters little comparatively whether thefields fill the farmer's barns. the true husbandman will cease fromanxiety, as the squirrels manifest no concern whether the woods will bearchestnuts this year or not, and finish his labor with every day, relinquishing all claim to the produce of his fields, andsacrificing in his mind not only his first but his last fruits also.
0 Komentar untuk "winter animals"