56 AROUND AN OLD HOMESTEAD. 



And thou shall quaff it: thou shall hear 

 Distanl harvesl carols clear ; 

 Ruslle of ihe reaped corn ; 

 Sweel birds antheming ihe morn ; 

 And, in ihe same moment hark ! 

 'Tis the early April lark, 

 Or the rooks, with busy caw, 

 Foraging for sticks and straw." 



I believe, too, with Emerson, that the farmer has 

 to encounter the same problems of life, while seated 

 before the open wood fire on his hearth, that the phi- 

 losopher meets with in his study, and reaches a solution 

 perhaps just as satisfactory; that it requires the same 

 struggle to do so, and the solving has with each the 

 same ultimate and fundamental truth and good in it: 

 just as the private soldier can know as much of courage 

 and patriotism and true love of country as the general. 



There is yet one thing further I will say. I have 

 made fires of poplar and tacamahac on the prairies of 

 Minnesota for my noontide; I have heard the bacon 

 sizzle over a roaring blaze of pine bark in a lone hun- 

 ter's cabin far back on Lookout Mountain; I have 

 warmed myself by the flames of the cottonwood along 

 the Cumberland and Ohio; I have broiled a rabbit for 

 my meal over the coals of the loblolly pine, far away in 

 central Arkansas; I have gazed across toward the 

 Catskills beside a fire of spruce in the Berkshires; I 

 have roasted venison for my lunch before a fiery mass 

 of birch deep in the forests of the Adirondacks; I have 

 cooked pickerel on a grating of stones heated by flames 

 of maple on the shores of Lake Superior; I have 

 watched the flickering blue flare of a driftwood fire 

 along the beach of the Atlantic; and I have found a 



