THE VILLAGE 
After hoeing, or perhaps reading and writing, in the 
forenoon, I usually bathed again in the pond, swimming 
across one of its coves for a stint, and washed the dust 
of labor from my person, or smoothed out the last wrin¬ 
kle which study had made, and for the afternoon was ab¬ 
solutely free. Every day or two I strolled to the vil¬ 
lage to hear some of the gossip which is incessantly 
going on there, circulating either from mouth to mouth, 
or from newspaper to newspaper, and which, taken in 
homoeopathic doses, was really as refreshing in its way 
as the rustle of leaves and the peeping of frogs. As I 
walked in the woods to see the birds and squirrels, so I 
walked in the village to see the men and boys; instead 
of the wind among the pines I heard the carts rattle. 
In one direction from my house there was a colony of 
muskrats in the river meadows; under the grove of 
elms and buttonwoods in the other horizon was a vil¬ 
lage of busy men, as curious to me as if they had been 
prairie dogs, each sitting at the mouth of its burrow, or 
running over to a neighbor’s to gossip. I went there 
frequently to observe their habits. The village ap- 
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