126 
WALDEN. 
related to society by this link. The men on the'freight 
trains, who go over the whole length of the road, bow 
to me as to an old acquaintance, they pass me so often, 
and apparently they take me for an employee ; and so I 
am. I too would fain be a track-repairer somewhere 
in the orbit of the earth. 
The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods 
summer and winter, sounding like the scream of a 
hawk sailing over some farmer’s yard, informing me 
that many restless city merchants are arriving within 
the circle of the town, or adventurous country traders 
from the other side. As they come under one hori¬ 
zon, they shout their warning to get off the track to 
the other, heard sometimes through the circles of two 
towns. Here come your groceries, country; your ra¬ 
tions, countrymen! Nor is there any man so independ¬ 
ent on his farm that he can say them nay. And here’s 
your pay for them ! screams the countryman’s whis¬ 
tle ; timber like long battering rams going twenty miles 
an hour against the city’s walls, and chairs enough 
to seat all the weary and heavy laden that dwell within 
them. With such huge and lumbering civility the 
country hands a chair to the city. All the Indian 
huckleberry hills are stripped, all the cranberry meadows 
are raked into the city. Up comes the cotton, down 
goes the woven cloth; up comes the silk, down goes 
the woollen; up come the books, but down goes the wit 
that writes them. 
When I meet the engine with its train of cars moving 
off with planetary motion, — or, rather, like a comet, for 
the beholder knows not if with that velocity and with 
that direction it will ever revisit this system, since its 
orbit does not look like a returning curve, — with its 
