THE BEAN-FIELD. 
171 
man in the field heard more of travellers’ gossip and 
comment than was meant for his ear: “ Beans so late! 
peas so late ! ” — for I continued to plant when others 
had began to hoe, — the ministerial husbandman had 
not suspected it. “ Corn, my boy, for fodder; com 
for fodder.” “Does he live there?” asks the black 
bonnet of the gray coat; and the hard-featured farm¬ 
er reins up his grateful dobbin to inquire what you 
are doing where he sees no manure in the furrow, 
and recommends a little chip dirt, or any little waste 
stuff, or it may be ashes or plaster. But here were 
two acres and a half of furrows, and only a hoe 
for cart and two hands to draw it, — there being an aver¬ 
sion to other carts and horses, — and chip dirt far away. 
Fellow-travellers as they rattled by compared it aloud 
with the fields which they had passed, so that I came 
to know how I stood in the agricultural world. This 
was one field not in Mr. Coleman’s report. And, by the 
way, who estimates the value of the crop which Nature 
yields in the still wilder fields unimproved by man? 
The crop of English hay is carefully weighed, the 
moisture calculated, the silicates and the potash; but in all 
dells and pond holes in the woods and pastures and 
swamps grows a rich and various crop only unreaped by 
man. Mine was, as it were, the connecting link be¬ 
tween 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 to their wild and primitive state that I cultb 
vated, and my hoe played the Bans des Vaches for them. 
Near at hand, upon the topmost spray of a birch, 
sings the brown-thrasher—or red mavis, as some love to 
