170 
WALDEN. 
your work if possible while the dew is on, — I began 
to level the ranks of haughty weeds in my bean-field 
and throw dust upon their heads. Early in the morning 
X worked barefooted, dabbling like a plastic artist in the 
dewy and crumbling sand, but later in the day the sun 
blistered my feet. There the sun lighted me to hoe 
beans, pacing slowly backward and forward over that 
yellow gravelly upland, between the long green rows, 
fifteen rods, the one end terminating in a shrub oak 
copse where I could rest in the shade, the other in a 
blackberry field where the green berries deepened their 
tints by the time I had made another bout. Removing 
the weeds, putting fresh soil about the bean stems, and 
encouraging this weed which X had sown, making the 
yellow soil express its summer thought in bean leaves 
and blossoms rather than in wormwood and piper and mil¬ 
let grass, making the earth 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 im¬ 
plements of husbandry, I was much slower, and became 
much more intimate with my beans than usual. But 
labor of the hands, even when pursued to 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 labo- 
riosus was I to travellers bound westward through Lin¬ 
coln and Way land to nobody knows where; they sitting 
at their ease in gigs, with elbows on knees, and reins 
loosely hanging in festoons; I the home-staying, laborious 
native of the soil. But soon my homestead was out of 
their sight and thought. It was the only open and cul¬ 
tivated field for a great distance on either side of the 
road; so they made the most of it; and sometimes the 
