LEAF AND TENDRIL 



never opens again, plead you there till your heart 

 breaks. 



A farmer's fields become in time almost a part 

 of himself: his life history is written all over them; 

 virtue has gone out of himself into them; he has 

 fertilized them with the sweat of his brow; he knows 

 the look and the quality of each one. This one he 

 reclaimed from the wilderness when he came on the 

 farm as a young man; he sowed rye among the 

 stumps and scratched it in with a thorn brush; as 

 the yea'rs went by he saw the stumps slowly decay; 

 he would send his boys to set fire to them in the dry 

 spring weather ; — I was one of those boys, and it 

 seems as if I could smell the pungent odor of those 

 burning stumps at this moment: now this field is 

 one of his smoothest, finest meadows. This one was 

 once a rough pasture; he pried up or blasted out 

 the rocks, and with his oxen drew them into a 

 line along the border of the woods, and with stone 

 picked or dug from the surface built upon them a 

 solid four-foot wall; now the mowing-machine runs 

 evenly where once the cattle grazed with difficulty. 



I was a boy when that field was cleaned up. I took 

 a hand — a boy's hand — in the work. I helped pick 

 up the loose stone, which we drew upon a stone-boat 

 shod with green poles. It was back-aching work, and 

 it soon wore the skin thin on the ends of the fingers. 

 How the crickets and ants and beetles would rush 

 about when we uncovered them! They no doubt 

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