Some farmers have begun to thresh and winnow their oats.
Identified spotted spurge (Euphorbia maculata), apparently out of blossom. Shepherd’s-purse and chickweed.
As for walking, the inhabitants of large English towns are confined almost exclusively to their parks and to the highways. The few footpaths in their vicinities “are gradually vanishing,” says Wilkinson, “under the encroachments of the proprietors.” He proposes that the people’s right to them be asserted and defended and that they be kept in a passable state at the public expense. “This,” says he, “would be easily done by means of asphalt laid upon a good foundation”!!! So much for walking, and the prospects of walking, in the neighborhood of English large towns.
Think of a man—he may be a genius of some kind—being confined to a highway and a park for his world to range in! I should die from mere nervousness at the thought of such confinement. I should hesitate before I were born, if those terms could be made known to me beforehand. Fenced in forever by those green barriers of fields, where gentlemen are seated! Can they be said to be inhabitants of this globe? Will they be content to inhabit heaven thus partially?
Sept. 4. 8 a. m.—A clear and pleasant day after the rain. Start for Boon’s Pond in Stow with C. Every sight and sound was the more interesting for the clear atmosphere. When you are starting away, leaving your more familiar fields, for a little adventure like a walk, you look at every object with a traveller’s, or at least with historical, eyes; you pause on the first bridge, where an ordinary walk hardly commences, and begin to observe and moralize like a traveller. It is worth the while to see your native village thus sometimes, as if you were a traveller passing through it, commenting on your neighbors as strangers.[337] We stood thus on Wood’s Bridge, the first bridge, in the capacity of pilgrims and strangers to its familiarity, giving it one more chance with us, though our townsmen who passed may not have perceived it.
There was a pretty good-sized pickerel poised over the sandy bottom close to the shore and motionless as a shadow. It is wonderful how they resist the slight current of our river and remain thus stationary for hours. He, no doubt, saw us plainly on the bridge,—in the sunny water, his whole form distinct and his shadow,—motionless as the steel trap which does not spring till the fox’s foot has touched it.
—— ——’s dog sprang up, ran out, and growled at us, and in his eye I seemed to see the eye of his master. I have no doubt but that, as is the master, such in course of time tend to become his herds and flocks as well as dogs. One man’s oxen will be clever and solid, another’s mischievous, another’s mangy,—in each case like their respective owners. No doubt man impresses his own character on the beasts which he tames and employs; they are not only humanized, but they acquire his particular human nature.[338] How much oxen are like farmers generally, and cows like farmers’ wives! and young steers and heifers like farmers’ boys and girls! The farmer acts on the ox, and the ox reacts on the farmer. They do not meet half-way, it is true, but they do meet at a distance from the centre of each proportionate to each one’s intellectual power.[339] The farmer is ox-like in his thought, in his walk, in his strength, in his trustworthiness, in his taste.[340]
Hosmer’s man was cutting his millet, and his buckwheat already lay in red piles in the field.
The first picture we noticed was where the road turned among the pitch pines and showed the Hadley house, with the high wooded hill behind with dew and sun on it, the gracefully winding road path, and a more distant horizon on the right of the house. Just beyond, on the left, it was pleasant walking where the road was shaded by a high hill, as it can be only in the morning. Even in the morning that additional coolness and early-dawn-like feeling of a more sacred and earlier season are agreeable.
The lane in front of Tarbell’s house, which is but little worn and appears to lead nowhere, though it has so wide and all-engulfing an opening, suggested that such things might be contrived for effect in laying out grounds. (Only those things are sure to have the greatest and best effect, which like this were not contrived for the sake of effect.) An open path which would suggest walking and adventuring on it, the going to some place strange and far away. It would make you think of or imagine distant places and spaces greater than the estate.