172 
WALDEN. 
call him — all the morning, glad of your society, that 
would find out another farmer’s field if yours were not 
here. While you are planting the seed, he cries,— 
“ Drop it, drop it, — cover it up, cover it up, — pull it 
up, pull it up, pull it up.” But this was not corn, and so 
it was safe from such enemies as he. You may wonder 
what his rigmarole, his amateur Paganini performances 
on one string or on twenty, have to do with your planting, 
and yet prefer it to leached ashes or plaster. It was a 
cheap sort of top dressing in which I had entire faith. 
As I drew a still fresher soil about the rows with my 
hoe, I disturbed the ashes of unchronicled nations who 
in primeval years lived under these heavens, and their 
small implements of war and hunting were brought to 
the light of this modern day. They lay mingled with 
other natural stones, some of which bore the marks of 
having been burned by Indian fires, and some by the 
sun, and also bits of pottery and glass brought hither 
by the recent cultivators of the soil. When my hoe 
tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to the 
woods and the sky, and was an accompaniment to my 
labor which yielded an instant and immeasurable crop. 
It was no longer beans that I hoed, nor I that hoed 
beans; and I remembered with as much pity as pride, 
if I remembered at all, my acquaintances who had gone 
to the city to attend the oratorios. The night-hawk cir¬ 
cled overhead in the sunny afternoons — for I sometimes 
made a day of it — like a mote in the eye, or in heav¬ 
en’s eye, falling from time to time with a swoop and a 
sound as if the heavens were rent, torn at last to very 
rags and tatters, and yet a seamless cope remained; 
small imps that fill the air and lay their eggs on the 
ground on bare sand or rocks on the tops of hills, where 
