THE BEAN-FIELD® 
179 
“ And as lie spake, his wings would now and then 
Spread, as he meant to fly, then close again/’ 
so that we should suspect that we might be conversing 
with an angel. Bread may not always nourish us; but 
it always does us good, it even takes stiffness out of our 
joints, and makes us supple and buoyant, when we knew 
not what ailed us, to recognize any generosity in man 
or Nature, to share any unmixed and heroic joy. 
Ancient poetry and mythology suggest, at least, that 
husbandry was once a sacred art; but it is pursued with 
irreverent haste and heedlessness by us, our object being 
to have large farms and large crops merely. We have 
no festival, nor procession, nor ceremony, not except¬ 
ing our Cattle-shows and so called Thanksgivings, by 
which the farmer expresses a sense of the sacredness 
of his calling, or is reminded of its sacred origin. It is 
the premium and the feast which tempt him. He sac¬ 
rifices not to Ceres and the Terrestrial Jove, but to the 
infernal Plutus rather. By avarice and selfishness, 
and a grovelling habit, from which none of us is free, of 
regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquir¬ 
ing property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, hus¬ 
bandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the 
meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber. 
Cato says that the profits of agriculture are particularly 
pious or just, (maximeque pius qucestus ,) and according 
to Yarro the old Homans “ called the same earth Moth¬ 
er and Ceres, and thought that they who cultivated it 
led a pious and useful life, and that they alone were 
left of the race of King Saturn.” 
We are wont to forget that the sun looks on our cul¬ 
tivated fields and on the prairies and forests without 
