THE BEAN-FIELD. 
175 
and selling them, — the last was the hardest of all, — 
I might add eating, for I did taste. I was deter¬ 
mined to know beans. When they were growing, I 
used to hoe from five o’clock in the morning till noon, 
and commonly spent the rest of the day about other 
affairs. Consider the intimate and curious acquaintance 
one makes with various kinds of weeds, — it will bear 
some iteration in the account, for there was no little 
iteration in the labor, — disturbing their delicate organi¬ 
zations so ruthlessly, and making such invidious dis¬ 
tinctions with his hoe, levelling whole ranks of one 
species, and sedulously cultivating another. That’s 
Roman wormwood, — that’s pigweed, — that’s sorrel, — 
that’s piper-grass, — have at him, chop him up, turn his 
roots upward to the sun, don’t let him have a fibre in 
the shade, if you do he’ll turn himself t’other side up 
and be as green as a leek in two days. A long war, 
not with cranes, but with weeds, those Trojans who had 
sun and rain and dews on their side. Daily the beans 
saw me come to their rescue armed with a hoe, and 
thin the ranks of their enemies, filling up the trenches 
with weedy dead. Many a lusty crest-waving Hector, 
that towered a whole foot above his crowding comrades, 
fell before my weapon and rolled in the dust. 
Those summer days which some of my contempora¬ 
ries devoted to the fine arts in Boston or Rome, and 
others to contemplation in India, and others to trade in 
London or New York, I thus, with the other farmers 
of New England, devoted to husbandry. Not that I 
wanted beans to eat, for I am by nature a Pythagorean, 
so far as beans are concerned, whether they mean por¬ 
ridge or voting, and exchanged them for rice; but, 
perchance, as some must work in fields if only for the 
