FOOT NOTES
OR
WA LKING  AS A FINE  A RT,
BY
ALFRED BARRON.
What is Art? Here is my answer;
Leg of tramp, and toe of dancer.
WALLINGFORD, CONN.:
WALLNGFORD PRINzINVG COMPANY.
I875.




COPYRIGHT SECURED.
1875.




TO M      AUD,
A PINKISH-BROWN DAY-OLD BABY,
LYING ON A PILLOW
LIKE SOME QUEEPR SHELL CAST ON THE SAND
BY A MIGHTY OCEAN-BILLOW.




Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages,
And palmers for to seken strange strondes.
-Chaucer.




PRE FACE.
IS book was written some ten years ago in the old
Connecticut town of Wallingford, and published in a
series under the head of "Foot Notes."  The lively
interest it excited was as much a surprise to me as it could
possibly have been to any one in my circumstances.  Since
then an English naturalist has written a work on botany with
the same title; but seeing no reason in that why I should
give up a good name, I have accepted the favor the "Notes"
met with, and have ventured to put them forth in their present
form.
This book will at once suggest the name of Thoreau.  In
the year I862 I read his "Succession of Forest Trees;" that
article overcame a certain prejudice I had against him, and led
to the reading of his "Excursions" as they appeared in the
"Atlantic Monthly" and finally to the reading of "Walden."
I. had long been a walker, and had even thought of making a
book full of homely things.  In I864 I sat down to write an
account of a visit to the Regicides' Cave, when I was suddenly
struck by a strong wave of influence which made the product
of my. pen quite different from  anything I had ever written
before.  That was the beginning of "Foot Notes."  I was




vi                      PREFA CE.
not at that time a Spiritualist, and am not much of one now:
but I must tell the truth, queer as it is, and leave it to take
care of itself. Some time after that I began to feel the presence *of an invisible companion in some of my walks.  At
first I thought it was the Evil One; then I came to think it
might be Thoreau.  It never spoke to me, nor injected any
thoughts into my mind to my knowledge; it only seemed to
want to be near me.  I should not have been at all surprised
if Thoreau had appeared to me.  Then on the other hand, I
should not have been surprised if I had seen a fairy among
the toad-stools.  Whether I was followed by an evil spirit, or
by Thoreau's familiar, or by Thoreau himself, or whether I
was only suffering from a disordered fancy, is a question which
some one must decide for me.  I had no purpose of imitating
anybody.  It was an easy necessity to write as I did.
The egotism of the book must find its excuse where the
book came from.  The writer was all eye when he wrote it,
and the printer had to get new I's before he could print it.
For my own part, I have always enjoyed certain egotistical
writers; and I still believe that it is as proper for a man to
show himself in a book as it is to show himself in the street.
But he must do it at his own risk; for neither the one nor the
other is. safe unless he is a civil person and sure of his
company.




CONTENTS.
PAGE
I. MYSELF — WALKING -THE LEGS,.        9
II. CONSIDERATIONS ON POWER,..  I7
III. LOOKING AFTER THE TREES' RED CEDAR -- STEALING,                   2 2
IV. IMPRESSIONS AND CONFESSIONS,..  31
V. VAGABONDS - AN EGYPTIAN,..      37
VI. LICHENS,.....         47
VII. OLD HOUSES —-MY NEIGHBOR,.    60
VIII. SKUNK-CABBAGE-JUST AN EYE FULLMR. HOKUM —MY FARM,..  73
IX. NIGHT WALKING,....    87
X. AN OLD PASTURE,...        IOI
XI. FOOT-PATHS - OX-TEAMSTERS,.   I09
XII. A PINEY-WOODS WOMAN,..-. 117
XIII. MEN,... 122
X IV. SUNDAY-THE BIRCH TREE- SUMMER
CATALOGUE FOR THE FALL TRADE,. 131
XV. REALITY-A SEER-DUTY,.   I39




viii             CQN7VENTS.
PAGE
XVI. ADDRESSED TO ME,... 146
XVII. DIRT,.....    50
XVIII. THE CITY-BACK NEIGHBORHOODS, I59
XIX. WHERE TO GO —AN OLD TOWN,   i68
XX. CREED OF A WOODCHUCK - WOODCHUCK HUNTERS — LIBERTY,. 177
XXI. WORKING  FOR  LOVE-DRY  SAWMILLS,.....   I87
XXII. MAKING MOAN- POKE-WEED,    ~ J99
XXIII. COMMON SOUNDS -LOOK AND LISTEN, 206
XXIV. BREAD,.....   218
XXV. WALKING IN THE RAIN,.. 223
XXVI.. FEAST OF COLORS — IN NOVEMBERWINTER-COLORS,;..   23 
XXVII. UP STREAM —MR. HOKUM AGAIN,  244
XXVIII. WORK AND ART,.... 25 I
XXIX. INQUIRING MY WAY —NOT LOST,   259
XXX. PRACTICAL MEN,...   266
XXXI. WEIGHERS AND GAUGERS,.. 273
XXXII. HEARTS AND HEADS,...   281
XXXIII. WAYSIDE TAVERNS- GOD,.. 291
XXXIV. UNDER ARREST-GRASS,..   303
XXXV. SIGNS OF SPRING-GOD IS WELL,  311
XXXVI. FELLOWSHIP-OLD SHADE-TREES,   316
XXXVII. SOCIETY -THE FORK IN THET ROAD, 324




FOOT NOTES.








FOOT NOTES.
I.
AM, dear reader, a tramp. There is
hardly a vestige of the chevalier left
about me, and I experience a sort of
pity for those people who can't go anywhere
without a horse. When I travel I like to
leave my beast behind.  It exasperates me
to think of folks putting on airs and calling
themselves the chivalry, and all for no other
reason than because their fathers rode horses
in England. For my own part I want nothing better than to find that my ancestors
met this world face to face, and foot to foot,
and trod it well under heel as good infantrymen. Nevertheless, I am willing to ride if
the thing in hand is unimportant, or if, perchance, my companion is a centaur; but when
my affair is weighty let me go to it on foot.




I o             FOO T NOTES.
I walk chiefly to visit natural objects, but
I sometimes go on foot to visit myself. It
often happens when I am on an outwardbound excursion, that I also discover a good
deal of my own thought. He is a -poor reporter, indeed, -who does not note his thought
as well as his sight.  And let me give notice
here, that when I go a tramping, as I did
the other day to the Regicides' Cave, I shall
report a part of my thought if I report at all.
You will get more from me if I keep
ON WALKING.
In order to walk profitably I find that experience and reflection  are  necessary.  If
you are led by a companion too vigorous for
you, or if you go too far, your walk makes
pretty heavy drafts on your strength and degenerates into a brutish affair. Too rapid a
gait, though it may be very exciting at first,
either dissipates the attention or centers it on
the mere act of walking. On the other hand,
a pace too slow begets a sluggishness of mind
and at once makes an end of all your fine
susceptibilities. You had better be riding a




ON WALKING.             I x
horse, or even turning a grind-stone, than be
lumbering about the country without having
your soul along with you. A trial will soon
teach you how much you can profitably do.
The profit of a walk depends on your waiting for the golden opportunity- on your getting an inspired hint-before setting out. If
you can command only a half-day's leisure,
then twelve miles  six out and six back  are
enough to bring you to some desirable place
for observation. If you have a whole day to
walk in you can easily make twenty-five miles,
and still have your home as a base of operations. In case you only wish to view scenery,
this distance can be exceeded; but I do not
think it pays.  If you confine yourself to
walks of twelve miles in every direction from
your home, you have a field of observation
comprising four hundred and fifty-two square
miles.
It would be strange if such a territory did
not have enough beauties of scenery, and
wonders of geology, botany, history and zoology to content anyone but a superficial man.
I say, therefore, let us do our duty where we




12            FOOT NOTES.
are, think where we are, observe where vxe
are, and let us be happy where we are, and not
tormented by the lust for foreign roaming.
Stand in your appointed circle, is the word;
and when God wants you in another, you
will get a hint in season.
Not to brag, but to help you see your own
advantages, I will mention some of those in
my circle of four hundred and fifty-two square
miles. I take Mount Tom for a center, and
sweeping the country with a twelve-mile radius, I touch the valleys of the Naugatuck,
the Quinnipiac, and Connecticut; the Hanging Hills, the highest land in the State; and
the Mounts Higby, Lamentation, Carmel, West
Rock, (this last is flavorous with history,) and
East Rock and Tetoket, all modest enough;
Pistepaug pond and Saltonstal lake, two blue
eyes that are always looking skyward; freshwater swamps, black and tussucky, and salt
marshes wholesomely fragrant, and New Haven bay that just hints at the largeness of the
sea. So far as the outward can inspire yot,
you must certainly have enough right where
you are for all intellectual fullness.  Your




THE LEGS.               I 3
true kingdom is just around you, and your
leg is your scepter.
THE LEGS.
A muscular, manly leg, one untarnished by
sloth or sensuality, is a wonderful thing, and
it is to be hoped that, as a pedestrian, I shall be
excused if I should notice it somewhat warmly; for, to extenuate further, my own slender
/eg-acy gives me a right to appreciate. another's richer inheritance.  If people were less
vain and loved beauty more, they would complain of fashions that hide all the comeliness
there is in a good leg. There are men whose
*legs equal those of the Apollo Belvidere;
and yet were it not for the chance revelations
of the out-door bath, we should have no better idea of their beauty than could be got by
contemplating an old pair of pantaloons.
Let us look at the leg as a machine-a little
askance if you please. The first thing to be
noted is, that it everywhere deviates in contour from the straight line. This deflection




14             FOOT NO TES.
from right lines is the compromise of nature
in her attempt to unite support and motion
in the same member. To confirm this we
have only to notice the very marked outward
curve of the thigh, caused by the bending of
the femur or thigh bone, and by the overlying muscles. This curve of the bone gives
room  on the inside of the thigh for those
large muscles which move the parts below
the knee. It is further noticeable that the
shin falls behind a perpendicular line from
the thigh to the foot.  This arrangement,
(perhaps more apparent than real, owing to
that heap of muscles in the calf that moves
the foot,) enables the muscles of the thigh to
bend the leg, otherwise they would exercise
their contractile power on a dead center.
The beauty of a leg nevertheless depends
largely on its straightness; for if it is too
much deflected, it loses its beauty of stability
and  sprightly  movement.  On  the other
hand, if it does not have the crookedness
that comes from a large calf and a thigh well
swelled out by muscles, it loses its beauty of
power, however active- and facile it may be.




TH. LEGS.               15
In short, a good serviceable leg is one that
hath a crooked straightness.
To continue our study a little further, let us
notice how the leg tapers from the hip to the
foot. The thigh, that great bundle of thick
muscles, is the seat and expression of power.
This part is the one of chief interest to the
pedestrian, provided'his feet are tough, for
its large muscles are chiefly concerned in
walking. I must not fail to call attention to
that wonderful muscle sartorius, or the tailor's
muscle, for it is that which enables the walker to fold his legs beneath him and take a
seat on the plain without even a clod to sit
on. From the knee downward to the foot,
flexibility, dexterity and velocity take the
place of power; still the great muscles of the
calf keep up a strong hint at that. And coming down from the thick and powerful thigh
we reach the foot at last, arched and springy,
versatile and conspicuous.
These members when in motion, are so
stimulating to thought and mind, they almost
deserve to be called the reflective organs. As in
the night an iron-shod horse stumbling along




I6            FOOT NOTES.
a stony road kicks out sparks, so let a man
take to his legs and soon his brain will begin
to grow luminous and sparkle.




II.
AM  compelled to admit that pedestrianism is at present altogether too
mannish.  Our'civilization in some
respects is such a poor little mouse, that a
free and simple companionship of men and
women in excursions so dear to a walker, is
a thing not to be thought of. In addition to
this, women have not yet won a sensible
working- and walking-dress.  Nevertheless it
is good for a man to keep himself in such
condition that he can do ten miles on short
notice.  The deficiency in this respect, to
which most people confess, is not a pleasant
thing to contemplate, and it brings me to
some
CONSIDERATIONS ON POWER.
I do not propose to speak of the power to
govern; neither of intellectual, nor physical,
nor moral power. Life is what I have in
2




18              FOO T VO TES.
mind; that something which includes all these
other powers, and gives weight of character
to a man; that which makes him strong, irrespective of his talent.  It is that which
gives momentum to the intellect; it is that
which gives strong wings to genius; it is that
which gives authority to morals. One man's
life is a great strong blaze; another man's life
is only a flickering candle.
But if this great force is- not transmuted
into intellect and moral sense, it simply makes
a tremendous animal. Without this intense
vitality there can be no great achievement.
If a race possess this, you may be sure that
a grand destiny awaits it. Caesar. relates in
his Commentaries that once when he was
about to engage in battle with the Germans,
a great panic was excited among his Roman
legionaries by the reports of those merchants
who had visited  Germany.  Those traders
declared that the Germans had such fierceness of eye that it was impossible to look at
them.  There is nothing to contradict this
estimate of the old Germans, extravagant as
it may seem. From that fierce and intense




CONSIDERA TIO.NS ON PO WER.     19
stock has sprung the dominant Anglo-Saxon
race, as well as the Reformation, and a wonderful growth of art and literature.
David, and Paul, and Luther, were undoubtedly men strong to the very base of
their natures. We are told that "not many
mighty are chosen;"  but, nevertheless, it
seems evident that God never delegates his
great works to a weak man. There are indications which point to the conclusion that
inspiration first comes to a man through the
strong passional side of his nature.
Whoever has reflected upon educational
themes, can scarcely have failed to confront
the question I have indicated. It seems to
me that we treat education superficially, until
we thoroughly consider the importance of
this great mass of passion and will that lies
behind the intellect, like the big weight of
iron behind the edge of an ax. A larger
mold of men is what we want. And to get
this we must stop treating men like a miscellaneous lot of hatchets and axes that are only
waiting to be ground. We are enfeebled.
We don't want new outlets for power when




20              FO0 T. NO TES.
power itself is what we lack. It is painful for
me to know that a man thinks that the grinding he gets at college, is going to settle the
great question for him, when I know that
greater weight of metal is what he needs. I
am sick of a culture that don't look toward
giving us strength of life. Instead of sending
our average children to school, thinking to
make uncommon men of them, let us first set
them to seeking every source of intense personality.  Let them  make blood; let them
cultivate, but not waste, its secret energies;
let them live a life of trust and invite inspiration, for these are the channels for an influx
of power. Life has not yet become so much
a sinecure that we can afford to spare one
atom of our momentum. I will say here distinctly what I have intimated above, that I
do not- wish to discourage culture; I only
want to have it backed by intense elemental
energies. It is stimulating to think that there
may yet be a university with a culture truly
invigorating. If I have succeeded in turning
attention to power, I shall think you one degree nearer to its realization; for the very




CONSIDERATIONS OA POWVER.        2 1
appreciation of power exposes us to its- influx.
The central energy of the universe stands
ready to fill us if we watch for its channels.




III.
N one of the roads leading to West
Rock there were three trees  two
______1_ white oaks -and a walnut, that had
achieved royalty. One of the charms of this
old region is that a tree here and there has
had an opportunity of reaching the highest
ideal of its kind. One soon comes to get a
sort of property feeling in the noble things with
which he is surrounded. *But loving your
neighbor's trees while he has the power to
cut'them down and'. put them to base uses,
is as perilous as giving your heart to a woman who may prove to be the property of
another.
I noticed some time ago that one of those
oaks had been cut down; it was but a sorry
consolation to think that its great strong arms
might be going to strengthen the sides of
some high-masted ship.. When I last saw it




LOOKING  AFTER THE TREES.       23
its trunk. lay headless and armless like the
body of a giant; a large section empurpled
by a sort of ink showed itself; and two men
in blue overalls and armed with a saw were
wagging their heads over it. When a grand
thing is destroyed, I say somebody ought to
be punished unless he can make a good defense of himself. What do I care for the
rights of property then?  So I go to the side
of the road; and there is a dialogue carried
on over a chestnut rail splashed with lichens.
"You are getting some pretty nice shiptimber out of that old oak?
"We are getting a lot of very hard work
out of it."  I never saw one of these wary,
unimaginative Yankees surprised into anything.
"Oh! I reckoned you were cutting it down
for ship-timber."
"We could have got some, but it would
have taken a good deal of work."
"So you cut it down just to make wood?
"Can't use only the limbs for that;" and
then they smiled at the idea of making firewood of that great knotted bulk.




24             FOOT NOTES.
"I suppose you know that tree was. one of
the largest oaks anywhere about here.'
"Yes, it was a pretty big one."
"Well, if I had wanted to buy your farm,
I would have given you fifty dollars more
for it if that tree had remained standing."They didn't smile at that remark, and I hope
they are now suffering all the pangs of vain
regret..
It is a wonder that such folk don't burn
their fences for fire-wood and get sent to a
lunatic asylum. I venture to assert that if
the owner of that oak had let it be and had
attended well to its discourse, he would have
got more good from it than from many a
sermon. I can only give the text on which
an oak enlarges. It is, "Be. strong; be patient in slow gains, and grow only for noble
uses.
An oak is the very embodiment of sturdy
endurance. Strength is its essence; it holds its
limbs at an angle that gives no hint of compromise with the storm or the law of gravity; its wood goes to fill strong offices; it is
the last tree to fade and drop its leaves;




LOOKING AFTER THE TREES.         25
its fruit even has a flavor that is tonic, and
a hint at virile energy, and a firm hold on the
imagination. And how mendacious we are in
our appreciation of this tree when we finish
our houses with pine and then hire some
painter to stain it in imitation of oak. It is
my purpose, you see, to defend all those trees
which by their splendid growth and being
prove themselves. more potent for good than
any reformer.
The fate of that great oak had made me
solicitous for the big walnut. Its thick trunk
and mighty limbs and crotches- suggestive of
untold uses in a furniture-shop - might prove
too strong for its owner's pride and love. I
therefore search out the sturdy man and salute him. He evidently has no poetic veneration for his giant, "but is keeping it from
some pleasure in its size; for he names what
he thinks is a great price for it.  I try to
strengthen its weak defenses in his mind by
telling him that it is the largest walnut that
I have ever seen in the State; yet I do not
feel at ease about it.
The destruction of that fine oak has made




26             FOO T. NOTES.
me somewhat wiser in respect to things that
surpass their fellows. Having been for a, long
time an admirer of trees, one of my pet ideas
has been to find a country that would cherish
its native trees until they could put on all
their dignity and grandeur and thick-clustering associations of home and love. Thus on
the borders of every region toward which we
turn our attention we station our ideals like
advanced picket-guards, and we progress because we have such ideals. Our hearts would
die out of us could we not realize in our
times of-defeat that there is an unmixed beauty
and goodness somewhere in the world. But
still I think we are a good deal pestered by
our ideals. If we try to advance, it is quite
likely that some one of these grisly fine
things will thwart our endeavor; if there is
any lion in the way, it is our paragon of beauty. I observe that handsome people, and
all natural objects perfect after their kind, are
very much sought after, and I observe, too,
that they do not always make us contented
with common things. I am going to be content with homely beauty —such beauty as




RED CEDARS.               27
comes to me a little mixed.  1 think I shall
find enough of it if I suck things diligently.
The red-shirted wood-chopper standing on a
log, and having for accessories only the gray
stems of trees and the blue-curling smoke of
his camp-fire, shall, if I choose, be as fine to
me as any gay cavalier cantering down the
street. And besides, I have had my successes
of this kind. I have seen trees, and people,
too, I had nearly said, so homely that they
were fascinating. Some such beauty as one
gets from the odd gargoyles of an old Gothic
building, I get from these ugly
REI) CEDARS.
The road to the Regicides' Cave is, in
several places, flanked on either hand by rows
of cedar that form avenues half a mile or
more in length. These cedar-fringed roads
are so common a feature hereabout, and the
tree itself is so rusty, thin and straggling, so
ugly, so grotesque withal and in such strong
contrast with the grace and dignity of other
trees, that I am compelled to compare it with




28              FOOT NOTES.
its kind in other places.  The red cedar is
very freakish and susceptible to the differences of soil and climate. Here in Connecticut
it is as I have described it. On the Hudson
it is exceedingly upright, dense and spindling,
and is almost the first tree that the traveler
notices in that region. In some of the Western States, in Indiana for example, where it is
very common in- the village yards, it is remarkable for its close habit and fine bronze
color. In North Carolina it assumes a broad
and flattened head, and is consequently a
low tree. At Washington on the Pamlico in
that State, there used to be an arbor of live
cedars covering a walk of considerable length
from the gate to the piazza of a mansion.- a
use to which this tree is by its habit there
well adapted.  I cannot go any further on
this theme without borrowing or
STEALING.
A writer soon finds himself in a strait. If
he read much and have a poor verbal memory, the bare seed of a thought may drop




PLA GIARISM.             29
down into his life while the husk is forgotten;
by and by that idea comes bubbling up to
the surface of his mind; he snatches the prismatic thing as his own, and if he do not bethink himself quickly, he is indicted as a
plagiarist. If he read little, but is given to
his own explorations, he is pretty sure to
make the same discoveries that others have
made before him. Then follow criminations
and recriminations which are pleasant to no
one. For my part I think there is a great
deal too much pettiness about such matters.
I sometimes get a sad pleasure from  seeing
one of my own neglected thoughts beautifully
elaborated by some genius who gets pay for
his -work. I shall not plunder wittingly, but
I shall open myself to inspiration with such
power and trust as are in me, and I shall go
on without fear of the charge of plagiarism.
A modern writer well says, "A man should
learn to detect and watch that gleam of light
which flashes across his mind from within,
more than the lustre of the firmament of
bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without
notice his thought, because it is his. In eve



30             FOOT NOTES.
ry work of genius we recognize our rejected
thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty."




ALWAYS have a particular experience when I reach a certain point on
E l~~     the road to New  Haven. I have
traveled on that road in one way or another,
by night and -by day, more than on any other
hereabouts, until I consider myself somewhat
familiar with its details and its capacity for
yielding pleasurable emotions; but on reaching
that place to-day, my usual experience was
repeated with such intensity and variation as
to remove it from the sphere of undefined
sensation to that of conscious thought. I can
not tell when this experience began, but- on
looking back I have concluded that it has always been a part of my sensations on that
road.  Presuming that my experience-the
character of which 1 will shortly explain  is
very common to every one who has a habit
of noting his impressions, I will speak of the
place with some degree of minuteness.




32             FOOT NO TES.
When about two and a half miles from
New Haven I always get my first glimpse of
the city; at this point the cliffs of East Rock
and the steeples and towers rising above the
trees, are seen against the sky, and they make
a picture which arrests me. The road here
descends, and passing under some elms and
red cedars, and looking down upon an artifi-cial pond, reaches the bottom of a little hollow with small outlook. The road up the
opposite declivity is flanked on the left with
barberry bushes still holding their red fruit,
and by a file of Lombardy poplars that have
an air of decayed gentility. These sickly exotics remind me of the gently-nurtured men
who, like Hugh Clitheroe and Clifford Pynchon in the tales, shiver and decay when circumstances grow stern. Further on, the road
is seen to become a quaint cedar-avenue. In
the bottom  of the hollow  is a small stream
fed by the pond on the left; it plods along
through a meadow, drops into a roadside
trough, drops out again, glints gently as it
passes over the gravel, darts under the road,
glistens out again, and finally disappears down




IMPRESSIO S              33
a glen which is wooded on the one side with
large oaks and elms, and on the other by a
thicket of evergreen lined with laurel. Looking down this dell you have a glimpse of
water; and once last winter I saw the skaters
and a fire down there; there was a black,
irregular star of sticks on the ice, above that
a cone of flame, and higher above a cloud
of smoke like a balloon.
It is in this hollow where I always feel the
presence of New  Haven. This sense of another presence is as distinct and unequivocal
as that which I experience when I first meet a
man. I am conscious of something that can
criticise and be criticised; something that can
impress my sentiment with its own sentiments,
and color my thought with its own thoughts.
The actual city is yet a long way from this
hollow, but for all that, I always find the
city gate out here on the Hartford turnpike,
and I have to pay toll. I have had this experience so often in this place, that I infer
that two and a half miles is the greatest
distance at which New Haven can sensibly
impress my sphere. I imagine it would not
3




34              FO0 T NOTES.
be easy to'resist the city fashions and lead a
simple, rural life, much within that distance.
It is needless for me to describe the particular nature of my impressions; it would
perhaps be too egotistical. I will say, however, that different cities affect me quite differently. Some of our Western towns which
are mostly devoted to business, almost torture
me by their influence. To be sure I know
that the people of New Haven are much
given to looking between the two shells of
an oyster; that many vessels come to Long
Wharf laden with sugar and molasses and
rum from the West Indies; that the city is
filled with great shops whose fabrics are multifarious and widely marketed; that it has
whole streets filled with trading men who,
compared with Western merchants, wait on
their customers with a subdued alacrity; and,
in short, I know that New Haven is a place
of great industry and enterprise; nevertheless,
the impression it gives me is one rather intellectual and suffused by taste and religious
feeling. Perhaps Yale College, with its hundreds of students in the heart of the city,




1IMPRESSIONS.            35
and with its numerous teachers holding the
high places, sends out the strongest emanation.
I do not know as I am any more receptive
than other people, but I sometimes think I
am. Once in a while I find that I have been
thinking another's thought and feeling another's feeling.' The depths then appear to
yawn around me; and I am  amazed, and I
wonder how  much of this that I call my
experience is really mine. My word, I notice,
has a flavor at times which indicates that
the taste of some book I had eaten had not
gotten out of my mouth when I spoke. May
be I am like butter, which is so easily tainted
by positive odors like those of leeks, or tobacco, or smoked herrings. Yet I think I am
not without a certain fierce individuality. I
am quite implacable when I think of one person selfishly violating the sacred personality
of another who is weaker in magnetism. I
have always lived a little one side just because I did not care to have even the good
enter my sphere with their influence. Still,
when I look into things closely I am compelled to admit that it is the rule of nature




36             FOOT NOTES.
that the strong shall penetrate and move
the weak.
I see the germ of a tremendous faculty in
these half receptivities. The man who has
cultivated his knack at impressions, might be
a terror to all sinners and darklings. Still
there may be some incompatibility between
the greatest receptivity and that perfect selfpossession necessary to the pursuit of science
in this direction. This sense is a window that
one hesitates to open, not knowing what may
fly in; a gate one fears to enter, not seeing
what spirits inhabit there. I have concluded
that some power or other is bound to fill me
and color my experience. But to whom shall.
I open myself?  Thor and Jupiter Were beaten
more than a thousand years ago; and their
friends won't deny that. The Vedas may be
very wise books, and very deep; and Brahma
may be a very great god, but I do not imagine that he is going to succeed much in the
end. On the other hand I think Christ is
going to win this world, for he has already
got hold of the strongest race; and I am
pretty sure there is superior strength and safety in the sphere to which he belongs.




SEE that pedestrianism is felt to be
a little shabby. People do not generally dare to go on foot, for they
fear the loss of social consideration. Indeed,
our gentility is but a little more than a question as to the ways in which a man performs
his getting-about. -A man was respectable to
that old British woman because he kept a
gig. The time was, when'a stranger traveling
on foot could not readily find entertainment
among the generous planters of the South.
Their war with the North will raise some of
those chevaliers to the dignity of walkers.
The disgrace of punishment is meant to be
intensified when some noble prisoner is borne
in a cart to his place of death. Old Floyd
Ireson "was tarred and feathered and carried
in a cart" by the women of Marblehead. I
have to confess that I often feel a very positive kindling of the imagination, when a brave




38             FOOT N7OTES.
man and a fine woman go past on proudstepping horses; and for an instant I partake
of the common illusion that these riders are
fortune's pets; I even feel some desire to act
in a like scene. I did not take to my feet just
because my neighbors belonged to the infantry. I,was living among the chivalry'when I
dismounted and betook myself to walking in
the dry hot sands; and I think I am as confirmed in the habit as any man should allow
himself to be. To return again: Walking is
so much practiced by a set of unfortunates,
who give no'luster to the act, that a man
needs to be rich in himself, and very earnest
too, before he will dare to assert his liberty
to use his legs.  In short, pedestrianism  is
almost entirely surrendered to the
VAGABONDS.
I find these wrecks upon most of the principal roads hereabout. Traveling singly, sometimes in couples, at other times in tripletsa man and two women, or a woman and two
men-this social flood-wood floats back and
forth between the great cities like broken




VA GABONDS.             39
things among the whirls and eddies of an estuary. These tramps are from almost every
nation; most of them, however, speak their
words with a brogue. To one who can find
the nerve necessary to study the picturesque
sides of degradation, these people offer much
that interests. One naturally inquires if they
ever had a chance in life, or whether they
have missed it. For the most part they seem
as if they had been overtaken and throttled
by their own passions; it is probable that
they never had a fair start in that race. One
can not believe that they were expressly designed to use up the surplus of cold victuals
and old clothes, which we are quite glad to
bestow on them. When I see one of these
men, foot-sore and weary, departing in a dissipated, hobbling gait, I always hope, notwithstanding the curious benevolence I may feel
for him, that his cold victuals may so nourish
him that he will be able to go a long way.
These strollers prove themselves good soldiers, for they feed on the country through
which they go, and they carry little or no
luggage. They are unphysiological to the last




40              FO0 T NO TES.
degree, eating as they do, irregularly, stupidly,
and at late hours before'sleeping. And for
most part they appear in' low condition -too
feeble even to make them good food for the
cannon. Though they are generally sober,'tis very plain that they have not always been
so. They have so little about them  that is
lightsome, one might suppose that laughter
and hot dinners were luxuries that depart together, and that pedestrianism is a sad employment.
Vagrant walkers, I judge, have long had
possession of these roads. In the year I768,
Mr. E. Hall, of Wallingford, brought these
tramps before the public. He writes in the
Connecticut 7ourial'. "As I have never burdened the public to read, or you to publish
any of my productions, I flatter myself the
subsequent succinct account will be forgiven.
As economy is the watchword of this reign,
as candor was of the former, in the courtly.and ministerial style, it has crossed the Atlantic, and is in high vogue in America as
well as Westminster, the city of the great
King. The story is this: A few days since,




VA GAB ONDS.
a strolling man in soldier's regimental garb,
calling himself James McCannon, with a blazing woman, came into my house in early
morn, begged for cider, already three mugs
deep, as I was informed; after some admnonitions given him, my affairs pressing my immediate departure, I left him in the house,
on which he became very boisterous, attempting to pilfer some things, which my domestic
discovered; finally carried off a brass save-all,
of a stand of candle-sticks (then undiscovered);
what else is at present unknown. This, though
trifling in,its value, intrinsically, but as an
ancient patrimonial legacy of high estimation,
riot only is a standing evidence of their prudent economy, but e*- vi termini a memento
to economy to save-all. And hereby I beg
leave to give warning to all families, to beware of such strolling pilferers, if they would
save all.  I beg leave to ask the  public,
whether it would not be of public utility, to
have task-masters in every town, to compel
them to labor, as they are passing every day
in our streets, and will be probably more and
more; or some other similar salutary measure."




42              FOOT NO TES.
These waifs appear for the most part to be
meekly resigned to that fate which thrusts
them out and dooms them to straw and cold
victuals. I never knew one to make the mistake of calling at any other place than the
back door, or of asking for any lodging better than a barn. Once in a while you can
find one who has not yet given up his fight
with the world and fate.
Outcasts as they are, it is interesting to
note their human ways, and their conformity
to the general drift of society. The men, even
in small things, never lose a certain attentiveness toward their women. Then, too, these
walkers always lie abed late on Sundays, just
like honest people. Walking is their business,
and on that day they stop work. A cleanish
shirt sometimes makes its appearance on this
day, but quite rarely though. They always
give some attention to their toilet, frequently
stopping to remove some of the chaff and
straw which sticks to their hair and beards.
Striking cuts of the mustache are often affected, and suggest that the man has worn
glossy hats and gay neck-ties  and flaming
vests, and has shone in city places.




Vl GABONIDS.             43
Their great thankfulness is not always courtly, a little abject rather; but still it is valuable as showing their formal adherence, at
least, to the principle, which I trust will yet
prevail, that love and kindly magnetism are
fair equivalents for bread and meat. One man
evidently proud of his good hand-writing,
once called for a pen and paper, and, to pay
for his dinner, wrote a recipe for making ink.
This man had learned book-binding in London, and when encouraged by the boys, liked
to display his knowledge. Another bestows
his thanks with a proud humility that makes
you think of a duke in disguise. Some make
such wild expressions of gratitude, and declare
such a generous readiness to part with all
they have to succor their benefactor should
he ever come to need, that one can not help
surmising that the fellows are doing a bit of
sly humor at his expense.
It is hard to stand before these sin-scarred
souls and not feel some of that interest which
attaches to all things human. They often make
a feeble reaching forth to get your recognition,
and to find in you some kind of social warmth.




44             FOO0 T XNOTES.
Here is a man who looks up with such mendicant entreaty, and from so great a depth, as
from the bottom of a pit, that I think it would
take fathoms of rope to bring him to daylight.
But there are those who do not call for recognition; their eyes smite you with such force
that you almost want to retaliate with a stick.
Notwithstanding Bulwer has given us that
very lovable old vagabond, Gentleman lWaife,
still the tramps are not so picturesque, nor do
they justly fill so large a place in literature, as
Zincalli, or Gipsies.  Now that I have reached
these vagabonds, I will tell my story of
AN EGYPTIAN.
When I was traveling in New York, my attention was arrested by a tent in the road. It
was shaped like an oven, and made of thick,
green stuff, with some additional blankets fastened on the arch to make it impervious to the
rain. The lining of the tent was made of a
reddish figured cloth. Near by stood a covered
wagon; and at the opening of the tent, seated
idly on an inverted pail by the fire, was a
swarthy, black-eyed and black-haired man,




AN EGYPTIAT.             45
with nothing uncommon about his dress except
a gaudy vest. All this promised to give some
new phase of vagabondage.  Mr. Oldcastle,
my companion, having little sentimental interest in the vagrant species, advanced to the
tent with something of the air of a hound
that had scented unusual game, and began
the dialogue.
"What are you doing here?"
"Camping."  If the man had been made of
wood he could not have exceeded the laconic
indifference of that single word.' What's your business?"
" I am a coppersmith, and my lady reads fortunes." The dignity of that answer was unique.
People who live in houses and never stroll,
sometimes show that they are a little ashamed
of their callings, but this man was above that
weakness.
" What nation are you?"
"I am an Egyptian," said the stroller, almost
with solemnity.  I knew the Gipsies called
themselves by that name, and my curiosity
was up.
"O h," said I, you are a Rommany Chal, eh?"
"Do you speak Rommany? "




46             FO OT No TES.
My question had penetrated the man with respect, and he flashed out into sight in a smile
and was ready for a trade in words. I was fresh
from the reading of Borrow's Lavengro and
Rommany Rye, and was glad of an opportunity to prove the truth of his remarks on the
Gipsy language. The stroller was an English
Gipsy, and spoke our tongue with remarkable
precision and purity of accent. H1is definitions
of the words 1 gave him were generally the
same as those given by Borrow. Still the atmosphere of the man made me feel as if I where
dealing with a thorough liar. I left the nomad
with a flavor of wildness in my mouth, which
for an instant made our house-keeping tame
enough.




VI.
HAVE said that a circle described
with a twelve-mile radius, and comprising four hundred and fifty-two
square miles, will make a field of observation
large enough for any but a superficial man.
But I now think that a field so large will be
too great for a thorough man. We are altogether too telescopic in our vision, and therefore never really know what is going on near
us. We look too much at things in bulk. For
this reason the microscope excites my wonder
and respect quite as much as the telescopes of
Herschel and Rosse.   I have noticed that
people are apt to pride themselves on taking
comprehensive views. For my part, I think a
good deal may he said in favor of narrow views
- views got by shutting one eye.
When a man is particularly hungry for something fresh, and when he is eager for dis



48             FOOT NOTES.
covery, he cannot do better than to begin his
search the instant he gets out of doors. I do
not see any particular reason for his getting
on a horse and starting off at a flying pace
to find something juicy.  I feel elated, and
humbled, too, when I make a little discovery
pretty near my door.  I am  humiliated because my superficiality has made me overlook
so much; and I am  elated to think that it
will be a great while before I have sucked
everything dry.  A devout man is receptive
to the spirit of perennial improvement, and
seldom needs to go far. He does not belong
to the class of whom it is said, "having eyes,
they see not."  If a man keeps his eyes and
ears open he will find much that is meant
particularly for him. He is well fed if he
finds nothing more succulent than one of
these dry
LICHENS.
These humble plants are a numerous tribe
and they inhabit every spot hereabouts more
fully than any place with which I am acquainted. They have possession of all the




LICHENS.                49
trunks of the trees in the woods, and have
pushed on their pioneers to the very twigs.
Old roofs, and old fences, and walls, and bowlders are all spattered and crusted by this
meek vegetation. The cliffs of Mount Carmel are painted with lichens which at the distance of a mile show as agreeably as frescoes.
Lichens that grow on the ground are not
generally so noticeable as those living on
wood and stone, yet some of the most important ones are peculiar to the soil. The northern and temperate regions of the earth are
the proper home of these plants.  They have
been found on mountains at the height of
eighteen thousand two hundred and twentyfive feet: this, their highest limit, is only
eleven hundred and seventy-five feet lower
than the highest point yet reached by man.
These comparatively invisible things, although
everywhere present, are nature's delicate under-clothing, which she is in no haste to exhibit except to her intimates and admirers.
In order to give a-greater degree of clearness to these notes, it now becomes necessary
to write with some little scientific precision.
4




50              FO  T  NO TES.
With the fungi and algw, the lichens are almost at the bottom  of vegetable life.  They
consist generally of "flat expansions, which
are crustaceous rather than foliaceous or leaflike."   They  are sometimes  "pulverulent,
dry, or leathery, sometimes thick, woody or
fungous."  They cling by  their under surfaces to the substances on which they grow,
" while by the upper they draw  their nourishment directly from  the air."  In organization they  are far below  the most lowly
plant that produces flowers. "Their fructification is in cups or shields, resting on the
surface of the thallus, or more or less immersed in its substance, or else in pulverulent
spots scattered over its surface."
The lichens should be distinguished from
the mosses, with which, in common language,
they are generally confounded. The latter
send up a stem which bears the fructification
in a manner similar to the flowering plants.
If one wishes to get a clear conception of the
great gap existing between the lichen and
some highly organized plant, like an oak for
example, which has roots, stem, branches,




ZLICHENS.               5
leaves, flowers, and a proper fruit, let him
conceive of that tree as being deprived of its
parts one after another until it is reduced to
a single leaf, with only an acorn cup sitting
upon it, and then let him suppose that this
leaf is glued to a rock or an old log.
Obscure and neglected as are these dry little
plants, they have nevertheless played, and are
still playing, an important part on the world's
stage. "The greater part," says Brande, "are
of no known use" to man; "but some, as the
reindeer moss, (Cladonia rangfiferina,) the Iceland moss (Cetraria icelandica) and various species of Gyrophora, are capable of sustaining life
either in animals or man. The Iceland moss,
when deprived of its bitterness by boiling,
becomes indeed a diet recommended to invalids. Others are used as tonic medicines,
as Variolaria faginea, and Parmelia parietina.
Their principal use is, however, that of furnishing the dyer with brilliant colors; orchall,
cudbear, and perolle, with many more, are thus
employed."  Old ladies in the country, who
are doctors on instinct, and are given to dosing
their children and their children's children,




52              FO0 T NOTES.
sometimes prescribe for colds a drink made
from lungwort, (Sticta,) a lichen which grows
on the north side of maple trees.  But all
these are trivial. uses.  The great office of
the lichens has been to prepare the earth for
higher races of plants, and finally for man himself. These plants, deriving their nutriment
from the air, and being comparatively independent, of that to which they are attached, are
the first to take possession of the rocks,
and their'remains mingled  with grains of
mineral are washed down into the hollows to
make a home for plants which have roots and
are dependent on a soil.
The colors of the lichens are exceedingly
varied; the prevailing tints'being neutral and
sober -such as subdued greens, grays, slates,
browns, and stone colors, which last are the
proper lichen colors;  all, however, have a
tint of green.  Positive colors are exceedingly rare.  I have  seen only  one lichen
that shows any kind of red. Yellow and orange are used with considerable freedom, but
still very rarely when compared with the
great mass of dull colors. It would be strange,




LIChtES.                53
too, if a man's words on this theme should not
prove to be a little dun-colored.
These thirsty things are no proper aquatics, but still they are exceedingly sensitive to
all the degrees of moisture. An old roadside
wall, though everywhere spotted with lichens,
always exhibits a thicker coating of them
wherever it is -shaded by a tree. They are
a petpetual shadow on the wall.  A cluster of
moss-grown trees shading a group of bowlders richly painted with lichens, makes a picture that often stops me in my walks through
the pastures. A rock lying in an unusually
damp situation, generally exhibits some new
varieties or species of lichen. These plants
are not varnished like leaves, and are, therefore particularly adapted to absorbing moisture from the air.  On a rainy day they imbibe, and dilate like crackers soaked in water,
becoming very lively in color.
All trees have more or less of these parasites, if they can be called such; but a tree
in condition for the finest growth generally
has the fewest of them. A half-dead tree often
makes a wonderful display of large lichens.




54              FOOT MVOTES.
Still they are not dependent on the tree for
support, for many of them thrive equally well
upon a stone.
I have found thirteen species of lichen on
a single apple-tree; and I notice also that
they have followed some order in their coming
to take possession.  The first that makes its
appearance comes when the bark is yet smooth
and green. This advances steadily upward as
the tree grows, always keeping in advance
of the other species.  It is a small kidneyshaped blotch of a grayish color, and is well
dotted with small brown spots no larger than
the dots I make with a pen. These spots are
the fructifying organs.  Sooner or later four
other similar lichens make their appearance
on the tree.  They differ in color, but have
the same kind of fructification.  These are.easily overlooked and require a low  microscope to develop their beauty.
The next lichen that comes, (Physcia stellaris,) has a light dun color; it is flat and full of
sinuosities and rounded subdivisions, much like
the antlers of a deer. It is seldom more than
an inch in diameter.  It generally settles at




LICHENS.                55
the base of a twig or fruit-spur, and its advance is about seven years behind that of the
youngest growths of the tree.  This lichen
when it gets older, shows little cups with
white rims and dark interiors, almost like the
liquor of whortleberries. Sometimes when not
larger than the point of the pencil with which
I make my notes, it has its little cup barely
visible to the naked eye. In the older specimens the cups accumulate and pile up till
they look like some of the tree corals.
Simultaneously with this lichen a greenish
yellow  and  smaller one (Thzeloschistes parietinus) is sparingly introduced. It requires a
microscope to exhibit its delicate tracery. A
little later, too, tufted lichens come on; they
are like low-branching  trees, and  have flat
branchlets. The first (Ramalina calicaris) is of
a dull bluish green; it is often the most abundant lichen on a tree, and it does not show
its cups until it is an inch high.  The other
(Theloschistes chrysophthalinus) is greenish orange, is seldom more than a fourth of an inch
high, and is never abundant; it has dark orange
cups. These two lichens never get so high up
a tree as do the others.




56              FOO T NO TES.
When the tree gets older and its bark
changes, a large greenish lichen, (Parmelia
caperata,) takes possession with others; a single specimen of this often grows to be a foot
in diameter, making it altogether the most
conspicuous kind in this region. It sometimes
almost entirely  envelops an old apple-tree;
but after a time the tree generally becomes
divested of this crust.  After this, and when
the bark has becomes rich in rottenness, then
proper mosses make their appearance.
The species of lichen which first take possession of a rock are little more than greenish
incrustations, called bissus, which finally make
a kind of soil for the more showy mosses
and lichens. On this stone near my door I
have found five different pulverulent lichens,
that might be easily taken for mere weatherstains. These cover nearly the whole surface
of the rock, and each one of them is about
six inches in diameter. They appear like
blotches made by the spreading out and drying of some thick liquid that had been spilt
on the stone. In their centers are large black
grains like kernels of gunpowder, or onion




LzczIENS.                57
seeds; these grains are the fructification. One
of these lichens has just a faint blush of lilac;
the rest are respectively black, gray, iron-gray,
and a rich yellow or orange. It is these that
give color to the rocks.  Sometimes a long
piece of roadside wall gets a rusty iron color
from this yellow granulated lichen. In some
spots I find the granulations have accumulated
and begun to peel off, carrying little pieces of
ggrit with them to make a real soil.
Of all the lichens growing on old wood,
the Cladonia cristatella deserves especial attention. This is shaped like a goblet; it often
grows three-fourths of an inch high, and it
bears its fruit in bright scarlet masses on the
edge of the cup. This lichen grows in rotten
spots on old fences. It is sometimes found
on a mat of leaves at the foot of a pine
tree, and  again  on  the  ground, although
in this case there is always some vegetable
matter in-the soil to which it clings. A low
decaying stump is its favorite haunt. The
outer edge of the stump is frequently encircled by a line of these goblets, as by a
string of coral beads.  Long lines of these




58             FOO 0 T NO TES.
scarlet cups often stretch from the ground to
the top of the stump. On the larger patches
of rotting wood, these lichens stand as thickly
as wine-glasses on the shelves of a crockerystore. In the early spring when the snow
has settled down from the tops of the stumps,
these plants gleam like coals of fire, and they
burn into the heart and brain.  On those
days when the winds are hostile, I sometimes
go to a sunny hollow to re-kindle my imagination by draughts from these fiery goblets.
I think I may say something about my
relations to the lichens, for I have lived
somewhat intimately with them.   I am  a
pruner; and the practical man who employs
me is vigilant against the insects that prey
on the fruit and shelter themselves on the
trees. I must be executive and not maunder;
so I labor along diligently scraping off the
loose bark, and mosses and lichens; but I
feel all the time as if I were doing a vulgar
thing like defacing frescoes and tearing down
tapestries. I suppose this practical man is in
some way needful to me; I too, might become
a good deal mossy were it not for the hard




LICHENS.                59
scrapings I get from him. But then it don't
always feel good to be made so bare, and so
very real.  I have  to get very near the
lichens, and I find that the smaller ones are
the most beautiful.  These little things have
sorcery about them; and one had best not
come too close to them.  I think they are
getting their revenge by fascinating me a little.
I don't dare to look at them much; I have to
work with my eyes averted a little; still I
cannot entirely resist their charm.  One of
these lichens has a light brown cup; and,when I look at it, it penetrates me like glances from the eye of a woman, and I forget
to look at the sun-glints on the river and at
the mountains when they are violet.




VII.
NOTICE that a man, whether he be
riding or walking, is always enveloped in a cloud of thoughts and impressions which touch him only by their finest
points, and which can scarcely be said to
make a part of his conscious feeling, and
much less a part of his conscious thought. All
these may affect him badly, or they may be
as soothing to him as any melody. Among
other conclusions, I have inferred from this,
that a man may have and does have a great
deal of latent happiness; something  very
different from active pleasure-seeking, and
conscious enjoyment. I find that all our gains
and victories are gradually turning  themselves into this latent happiness, and that we
have to make an effort from  time to time in
order to know just how happy we are. This
is a kind of invested happiness I like; it
yields more solid income than any "three




AvN OLD HOUSE.              6r
per cents," or "five-twenties."   I expect to
find that the hoarding of treasures in heavenly
places, is but a little more than getting this
latent happiness which saves us from evil.
We are told that this delicate cloud of experiences which surrounds us, is referable to
spirits. Well, the philosophers who are bent
on ultimate analysis, may pronounce the
trunk of our tree to be this or that, but I
shall not concern myself with their dicta in
these notes, provided I find wholesome browsing on the leaves and twigs.
It occurs very frequently when I am walking
that some one of these nebulous experiences
becomes solid and tangible; so that I can
turn it about in my hand to count its spots
and note how it is striped. Such happenings
are not the least important to a walker and
looker.  One of these befell me to-day.  I
am arrested by this natural-colored house at
a crossing of the roads. It is a large one,
and hints at ideas of hospitality) and Awarm
sociality  in the mind  of its builder.  The
door hangs ajar on one hinge; the windows
are partly  filled with fragments of empty




62             FO 0 T NO TES.
sash; and clapboards hang suspended by single
nails. A dense thicket of self-sown maples is
growing between the house and the road.
Clumps of chestnuts, oaks, alders, and shrubs
have crept in stealthily from the woods toward
all sides of the house, until they have obliterated every trace of domesticity from  the
scene, except the old shell itself. Before my
legs can carry me away from the place, my
mind has begun to collect all the impressions
which have been made on it by innumerable
OLD  HOUSES.
I have had a good deal of experience among
old houses. I find them everywhere. I have
lived in them, and I have visited friends who
live in them. I have in a small way experienced ownership of old houses. Indeed I
should not like to live where the houses are
all new. I think I am  attracted to an old
house by the same instinct that makes me pick
for the moldiest bits of cheese on the plate. I
like houses, as well as men, that have seen
life. What do I care for houses or men that




OLD H- OUSES.           63
are only new and stylish? I try to encourage
them by saying, "You are not to blame for
your youth:'tis something you will outgrow;
when you have done that then I may attend
to you."
Whatever I say on this theme will necessarily have an oldness about it; and this brings
to mind a remark of a neighbor who never
is afraid to speak his mind.to me: "Your
talk," said he, "has this excellence; it never
has anything new in it. As to any instruction to be got from it, one might as well talk
to himself; yet it is easier to listen to you
than to soliloquize." I winced all over at
that speech, and tried to say forty things, but
could not say one.
There are scarcely any houses in our country
that are much more than relatively old.  I
notice that in regions timbered with beech and
maple and hemlock, the buildings get to be
old when quite young; while in places where
the oaks and more resinous pines abound, they
have a vigor of frame that is admirable, and
look hearty until very aged.
One of our old houses built in the colonial




64             FOOT NOTES.
times, has, for all I know, as much power
over the emotions as a much older one across
the sea.,This is especially true if a man be
not very well read, and is a little indolent
too; for a good deal of reflection is necessary
in order to get the whole of an ancient thing.
I shall not concern myself with any of the
colonial houses I have seen: but only with
such as I see everywhere-either going to decay over the heads of Puritan occupants, or
filled with alien broods, or given up to briefest ruin and utter desolation.
To own but little is a good thing. Exclusive possession I find does a great deal to
canker one's enjoyment. Let me see a lichen
on my roof, and I feel as I did when they
first told me I was becoming gray. Let me
detect some rottenness in my house, and I feel
as if my very bones were carious too. Nevertheless, I like to note all the signs and modes
of decay in some old house for which Providence has in no way made me responsible; I
can then give a lazy sympathy to all those
natural forces which are always so busily at
work reducing our best fabrics to dust and
rottenness.




OLD'HOUSES.              65
Here is an old house settled at one corner,
a victim  of some treachery in the cellar.
Here is another all aslant, that hints at
unfaithful -carpentry. This other -with sunken
roof and bulging sides, seems- oppressed with
life-weariness, and ready to give up and collapse. I walk around an old house and note
the rottenness that is feeding on the threshold
and the window-sills, and the corners of the
sash, and' the cornices.  I see the green tufts
of moss seated on the door-and window-caps
on the shady side of the house.  I see the
opening joints, the holes about the nail-heads,
and the weather-stains -whiteness here, and
a gathered blackness and rottenness there.
The shingles, notched, worn thin, and spotted
with lichens,'are warped until the old'roof
looks like gray scroll-work.  I observe all
these and'enjoy the flavor of' moldiness I
get from them.
When an old house is utterly deserted, all
its accessories stand ready to help carry out
the desolation. The domestic weeds, plantain,
nettles, burdock  and chickweed  spring up
with'in'creased -vigor.' The hop-vine crawls
5




66              FOOT NO TES.
along the ground to find a fence or some
small object to climb. Poison ivy takes possession of the cherry-tree. The caraway and
fennel —much liked by mother and the girls,
and a little scorned by father and the boys
come up feebly in the confusion. The maple
trees cast down sticks to perplex the annual
mower.  And venturing on the scene, the
explorer disturbs the toads that find good
squatting among the rank weeds. He looks
down the well at a fluid as repugnant as a
draught from a witch's cauldron.  The doorstone sunken at one edge, affords a sunning
place for adders that on his approach glide
into some hole, flirting their tails as they disappear.' But he never thinks of resting on
the ground, it has such a seeming foulness.
Every town has its oldest house. It is quite
as interesting as the oldest inhabitant;'tis so
dense with the life of men and women. A
house gets to seem much like the body of a
man. The old-fashioned nails in the finishing,
the quaint door-fastenings, the bricks lying
askew on the chimney-top, are all radiant with
a human light. I am always a little abashed




OLD 1O0 USES.            67
when I enter an old untenanted house, I find
so many people there. I feel the need of an
introduction.  I meet the projector of the
house, whose plans were limited by his necessities and by his private needs for a house.
1 meet the builder, who understood houses in
their general adaptability to human wants. I
meet the mother and the children, and the
children's children. I meet all those who have
brought young wives into it; all those who
have come a-wooing, and all those any way
related to it by ties of consanguinity.  The
obsolete moldings and queer finishings of the
best room; the worn places on the floors and
stairway; the marks of shovel and tongs on
the woodwork of the great fire-place; the tally
marks scratched on the cellar and chamber
doors - four perpendicular marks, with a fifth
one drawn diagonally across them   marks
telling of transactions in apples, or corn, or
potatoes; the nut-brown beams and rafters of
the unfinished chambers and garrets -timbers
that still show that the unknown ax-man understood his business and was in earnest to
do good work, for his ax was sharp and his




68             FOOT rNO TES.
blows were struck with equal force and at
regular intervals upon his log; —all these are
full of human interest, and I notice them with
the same zest as I look upon men.
Old houses are indeed so humanized- their
former inhabitants never seem to get entirely
out of them —and they so strongly impress
the imagination, it is no wonder that simple
folk have been so ready to make them the
habitations of ghosts. Then, too, the weight
of remorse and sin is so great, it is very
natural that this phantom brood should be
thought to be angry souls who have been
wronged in-'body, or estate, or in some right
of the affections.  The period between the
time ot Salem witchcraft and modern spiritualism, has witnessed la great diminution of
this airy population, but with the new beliefs
it will be strange if the old houses do not
once more become tenanted; indeed, if we
search somewhat closely, men and women
will be found who show a readiness to people
their neighbor's house with this unpaying
tenantry. After reading Owen's "Footfalls,"
one feels unneighborly and not quite up to




OLD HOUSES.              69
common sense, if he does not believe in and
welcome such inhabitants.
Houses that were built'by rich landlords
for their tenants, seldom have much interest
for me. But an old house, whose projector
began small, who planned, economized, and
hoped for it, and who built considerately and
put his heart into it, can not fail to attract an
increasing interest the older it grows. I get
a somber delight from the examination of old
houses; in short, I find them every way interesting except as things to own or live in. An
aged pair with cooling hearts and abated energies, and living alone in an old housedamp, and mold, and spiders, and rottenness
gaining foothold in the cellar; cobwebs, and
lumber, and dust stealing downward from the
garrets and chambers; or a young couple
without the enterprise and energy to overcome and rejuvenate their old house, but contented to settle down and grow older with its
oldness, these are aspects of life in these old
buildings that one does not always like to
ponder.
Old houses do get a good many taints be



70             FOOT NO TES.
sides bad smells; they become morally tainted.
I don't think the world is ready for the most
permanent houses. People have to build new
ones from time to time in order to escape
from the inheritance of sin and death that
fills an old dwelling like a vapor. A man who
has made his house the scene of a seduction,
followed by the suicide of the wronged husband, may be very glad  of any pretext for
building a new one, and for letting the theater of his crime find its way to the swiftest
decay. But old houses, my faith assures me,
will some time grow sweeter as they gather
years, and will be filled with shining souls
from the world of light.
My neighbor, to whom I have referred, has
one of these old houses. Fifteen years ago
he built himself a smaller one near by, and
gave up the old mansion to the usual course
of down-hill experiences. The reason he gives
for building the new house never seems quite
satisfactory, for it is not nearly so well situated as the old one. He always manifests
some uneasiness when questioned on this topic,
showing a disposition to turn the conver



AN OLD HOUSE.              71
sation toward other things.  He could not
have been actuated by any motives of economy, for I am sure it would have been cheaper at that time, to have thoroughly repaired
the old one, and added some ornaments and
conveniences.  He then would have had a
sweet new house with the flavor and sanctity
of age still clinging to it, and it would have
made him  a more dignified home than his
present one.  There is a sense of mystery
about the matter which at times almost stifles me.
People who live a good deal in isolated
farm-houses, seem to dwell in a sort of social
twilight, and they have a way of looking at
one another that reminds me of owls in the
daytime. They observe one another from stations so remote that they never see some things,
and what they do see is often distorted by the
intervening haze.  The life in these houses
may seem  tame and sluggish; but still it is
full of slumbering passion, and from  time to
time it wakes up and makes tragedy for tfose
concerned. I mean therefore to find out why
my neighbor built his new house.




72             FO0 T NO TES.
I had one day been sitting on the doorstone, in the shade of. his old house, and had
been engaged in breathing its atmosphere and
in turning over some of these old thoughts,
when I found I had lost my whereabouts in
the day. Starting for home I met my neighbor and asked him to set me right.
"You look," said he, "as if you ought to
be set right as to the time of the world."
"I am only a little confused by having an
hour or two glide away from me unobserved,"
I answered; nevertheless I felt hit.
"I often see you mousing around my old
house here  You allow your mind to be occupied by the most trivial objects, and you
seem dead to all the great questions of the
age. What is such a man as you good for?"
I did not tell him-perhaps I could not: but
I went away wondering why he was so nettled by my visits to his old house.




VIII.
HAVE observed that people like to
l glance at the contents of a basket
brought home by the excursionists
who have spent a day in the woods, or at
the  glen, or on  the  mountain.  Curious
pebbles, greasy scraps of paper, leaves from
unfamiliar species of trees, bits of bread,
wild flowers which. for some cause. were
deemed worthy of plucking and are carefully
done up in grass or leaves, fragments of
crackers, and corners of rock knocked off
and picked up for good geological reasons.
I have also noticed that a pedestrian brings
home another basket filled with things that
he is in no, haste to exhibit. For it may be
filled with homely stuff of which he is a
little- ashamed, or it may hold some gay
trifles very interesting to himself but utterly
worthless to any one else; trifles which like
butterflies will suffer a great deal- by handling




74             FOOT NOTES.
for exhibition. When I get home I like to
sit down and see what I have collected in
my basket, and empty it with a leisurely reflectiveness.  It often happens that things
come out much  changed from  what they
were when first picked up and put in: they
are sometimes inclined to grow.  To-day I
found in'my basket a picture, an experience,
a thought, and some facts pertaining to
SKUNK-CABBAGE.
I have been in nineteen of the States, but
Connecticut is the only one that has taken
the trouble to make me acquainted with this
potent herb.  Skunk-cabbage (Symp/locarpus
fwtidus) is an herbaceous perennial that delights in wet places; still, I have found it
growing thriftily on an apron of gravel washed
out into a swamp from the adjacent knolls.
It does well in the wet pastures and meadows;
but it appears to prefer a shady situation. I
sometimes find an acre of it growing in the
woods along the Quinnipiac, where the grasses
have not crept in. These large patches, surpass in interest my cabbage-garden, and my




SKIUNI- CABBA GE.          75
field of pie-plant.  I have often thrust my
head into the large thickets of alder, red
maple, and spice-bushes overrun with wild
grape-vines, in order that I might look after
the cat-birds, and I have been diverted by
the luxuriance of the skunk-cabbage growing
there in company with the brakes and wild
turnips.
This plant gives us our earliest wild flower.
Its purple sheath inclosing the spindle that
holds the proper flowers, grows scarcely
higher than the stubble of the meadows, and
it frequently obstructs my feet during an
early spring walk about the farm. The leaves
do not appear until some time after the blossom. Young people hunt out the most sunny
spots in the woods to find the earliest flowers
of the trailing arbutus, but they don't see
the skunk-cabbage which is blooming vigorously in the wet meadows. Nature seems to
thrust up the broad leaves of this plant to
remind us afresh of her wonderful exuberance,
which'we have been forgetting all winter.
Although  the skunk-cabbage belongs to
the same family (Aracw) with the wild turnip
or "Jack-in-the-pulpit," it has also one very




76             FO0 T NOTES.
aristocratic relative, the Calla Ethiopica of our
green-houses.  I made this discovery with
some such feeling as I had when I found
that the grocer on the corner was a brother
to the governor.
When I walk about among  the  dense
growths of this plant, reaching up to  my
thighs, I  call forth an  odor  somewhat
striking -excitable people may call it awful
and not be very wrong, for it inspires me,
too, with a sort of awe. I don't wonder
that people try to  propitiate the powerful
thing in order that it may help their maladies.
It has been found to be an anti-spasmodic.
Most herbs, as well as this, are medicinal to
me. Nature is a fine old herb-doctress; she
lets me walk around among her siinples, and
she cures me of some things without requiring me to swallow any of her skunk-cabbage.
About the last of June its leaves begin to
Lose their tropical luxuriance, and grow quite
yellow and rusty.
1 think people suffer some because they do
not get enough of what they call the big
things. Fishing from the middle of the pond,




BUST AT EYE FULL            77
bringing down your game from the highest
tree-tops, and bringing up' mud by deep-sea
soundings are all grand things, I admit, but
I have need of smaller ones. Like a geologist
among the rocks, I am glad when I can any
where find an angle that admits of being
knocked off. -The summer so overwhelms me
with its profusion, that I feel a little famished
sometimes in trying to deal with the immense
bulk of things, and I am inclined to think
that nature has not cut her meat fine for me
as careful mothers do for their youngest
children. This reminds me of another speech
made to me by my neighbor.'Before you amount to much as a thinker,"
said he, "you will have to begin to do your
own  carving."   I think I should  like to
carve him a little if I only felt stout enough.
But to? resume: If I look about me with
some diligence, I most always find that nature
has prepared some little thing for me, that is
just a mouthful or
JUST AN EYE FULL.
It is a picture in the early spring- I find
many such near the foot of these basaltic




78              FOOT NOTES.
mountains - and it is valuable only as a specimen brick from the house I live in. The
fore-ground  is a narrow  lowland  meadow
faintly green with springing grass and bunches
of poke and fetid hellebore; and still somewhat brown with last year's stubble and old
tufts of rank, wild grasses. On either side is a
moderate swell of ground timbered with tall
chestnuts that stretch their arms over the
little meadow. A brook, now pouring over
chance dams made of sticks and leaves, and
now eddying in the bends under the tussucks
where the trout lie, is hurrying along in its
devious channel.'A crouching, creeping, and
stealthy fisherman, casting his hook here and
there, animates the scene.  In the middle
ground is a white farm-house, half obscured
by the purple mist of the apple and maple
trees.  The neighborhood is unfamiliar to
me, and so I am sure the dwellers in that
house are all happy and shining, for I have
not had time to dissipate the illusion which
at first makes us see an elysium in every new
place. If I change my position I bring into
view an old red house, a mill and its dam,
all seen through the grayness of the inter



MY TWO FRIENDS.             79
vening tree-trunks. The brooks in this State
only play as much as they can after turning
water-wheels at all the sportive points in
their careers. The background is the side of
Mount Beseck: gray with rugged rocks, black
with patches of pine, and near enough to
inspire a mingled admiration and awe.
To make his walking the most pleasurable
and profitable, I often think a man needs to
be emancipated not only from his ignorance
and prejudices, but also from much of his
knowledge and culture. Having wrought in
a variety of callings, I have come to be a
little of many things, farmer, printer, horticulturist, pedagogue, landscape-gardener; and
I have chosen my friends from the trades
wherein I have labored.  I seldom  like to
walk alone; some one of these friends often
goes with me. My friend Hokum, the farmer,
and Kent, the ornamental gardener, have frequently walked with me.  They are both
progressive enough; still they are somewhat
narrow-minded, as men of one calling are apt
to be, -though broad enough in their way.




8o              FOO0 T NOTES.
It often happens that I do not see much
except what they point out, and their special
criticisms have kept me from enjoying many
things which I knew might be pleasurable.
Hokum is severe on all signs of bad farming,
and Kent is always sure to find fault with
the arrangements and surroundings of the
farm-houses.  I have had much difficulty in
getting along with him. Still he is so elegant,
refined, and progressive in all his ideas, I
have felt as if I ought not to get away from
his influence.  But to-day, without having
had any quarrel with him, I found myself
free to take in' all the homely beauty there is
in this farm-house, at the turn of the road.
A large, gambrel-roofed building, standing
beneath elms, maples, and mazzard cherrytrees. The second story projects on all sides
six inches beyond the first, and the garret
projects as much beyond the second; giving
the house a look'as if'standi'ng on its little
end. It has all the quaintness that any of
our old-time New England houses can offer.
Through a three-cornered opening made by
the looped-up white: curtains in' the green



MY TWO FRIENDS.             8 
shuttered window of the best room, I see the
top of a mahogany chair. The garret window
is propped up with an ear of corn set on end.
In the narrow front yard are a few shrubs of
lilac, syringa and box.  On one side is the
garden, with a row of currant bushes in the
grass, a wildling grape-vine clambering at will
over an arbor, many tall weeds of last year's
growth everywhere, (for it is early spring,)
and a wall to surround the whole, as if to
keep the confusion from spreading over the
rest of the farm.  In the rear is the woodpile, the ash-house and ley-leach. Across the
road, and almost exactly in front of the house,
are the barns, sheds, and cattle-yards, with all
their living scenes plainly in view from the
parlor windows.  In the road near the barn
is the big ox-cart, its tongue resting on the
ground, and the clumsy, unpainted ox-sled,
with its four great stakes roughly finished
with an ax. In the road on the other side of
the house are oak and chestnut logs, the last
showing rich yellow ends; new chestnut rails
and stakes in piles, and cedar posts showing
red hearts that are aromatic.  Mossy walls
6




82             FOOT NOTES.
and wooden fences stretch away from the
house along the roads and underneath the
trees.
I was glad of my liberty to see the old
place by my own light, unmingled with any of
Kent's fastidious illumination. If 1 were an
artist and called on to make a picture of what
I have attempted to describe, it should be
done lovingly and with pre-Raphaelite fidelity.
Nevertheless, when I come to fix up my home
I am going to get Kent to do it.
I threw off Hokum's influence a long time
ago. One day he and I were walking in a
retired neighborhood when we fell into discourse.
"I like to walk here in Connecticut," said
I, "these old farms have so -much nature
about them-in short they are so wild. Out
West nature seems to be a good deal startled
from  her repose and to be on the retreat.
But in this old town she appears to be stealing back to take possession again, and to harmonize all our works. Fine old trees are so
plenty on every farm, they quite take off the
harshness and angularity which characterize




MY TWO FR lENDS.            83
farms in-the new states. With all its manufacturing enterprise, this State is quite sylvan;
and the people, with all their civilization,
seem  like foresters.  Just notice how nature
has stolen back and put her lichens and mosses
on the houses and fences and the very trees
the people have set out. She has planted
hedges of briar and elder alongside all the
fences; she has planted groups of shrubs by
all the rocks; and she has put clambering
vines on everything. This is a country that
deserves to be looked at."
"You mean," said Hokum, "that the farms
are all grown up with trees and brush; but
I don't call that great farming."
"Mr. Hokum," said I,'your remark smells
of the barn." He had broken so many of my
bubbles, I answered more abruptly than is my
habit.
"Ha! ha! ha! I like to see things just as
they are if I see anything;" and then he
laughed again.
"That is all well enough,"  I answered,
growing cooler; "but your ideas always have
a squint about them as if you looked at things




84             FOOT NOTES.
through one of the bows of your ox-yoke.
Considering that Connecticut has sent schoolmasters to the South, pioneers to the West,
and has invented, manufactured and distributed
so many conveniences for civilized living, it
is not strange that her farms left to father
and the youngest boys should become rather
picturesque."
"I think your own affairs would prosper
better, if you could be as practical when
abroad, as you are when at home."  He
looked grave when he said that.
"Friend Hokum,"  I had now become entirely cool -"I know that some of your
thoughts are as sweet as your clover-lot, and
as beautiful as your rye-field when the wind
plays over it, but then you have many ideas
that smack of your farm. For example, when
we visited the Central Park you seemed to
admire everything, but after looking at those
beautiful lawns, you said, as if still lacking
something,'I should like to see a great field
of nice red clover in bloom, somewhere about
here.''.'
" Yes, I remember it," said he'very good



MY FARM,                   85
naturedly, "but I am  going to  stick  to  the
clover."
We understand each other now; and when
we walk together he is free to enjoy  all the
good farming, and I am free to enjoy all the
rest. Hokum is a good fellow; and I mean
to have his advice about
MY FARM.,
I have a farm;'tis rugged, rocky, small,
And round it creeps a tumbling, spotted wall.
And by it proudly goes the great highway,
Where covered wagons chuck and grind along
With four big horses, and dog and bucket
Beneath their axle-trees. It feeds a cow,
A sheep, a scrambling, horned goat, and has
A cobbly patch for beans and tucket corn.
And somewhere near its very center, is
A peaty bog, where grow your plumy ferns,
And arrow arum, twisted flags and fetid
Hellebore - a sort of black despondency
Within its heart, you see. Beyond this slough
There is a shaly, stony slope, all lush
With tangled brush, and stunted trees,
And hanging vines; and down it comes
A tinkling rill which springs from underneath




86               IOOT  NoTES.
A jagged, tott'ring cliff, o'erhung with moss
That swings like wool upon the flanks of sheep.
And over this a shade of oak and'nut,
And purpling ash and pine.  My farm - it is
Not much for bread or meat, you say; and yet'T is mine, and in the flush of spring I have
To build a tower, love my love, and sow
My seed, obey my God, and tell my dream,
And in the fragrant autumn-time I mean
To garner nuts and wine, and cribs of solid corn.




IX.
SHOULD be sorry to learn that anything I have said in favor of pedestrianism had increased the burden of
any overwrought man, by making him feel
that he ought to add a walk to his usual day's
work. Walking for such purposes as I have
given, is, indeed, a very wholesome sort of
amusement, and it is free to everybody. It is
not so highly appreciated as it justly deserves
to be: for this reason I am going to speak a
good word for it. I am a working man, and
I spend some of my leisure in walking; from
it I derive instruction, gentle exhilaration and
contentment; but it by no means follows that
for this reason I should attempt to scourge
others into my ways. People with new and
valuable ideas are generally quite enough
given to this kind of persuasion. The walker
needs an inspiration somewhat peculiar. If
you undertake a walk from any superficial or




88              FOOT NOTES.
extraneous reason, you will be pretty sure to
find it a tedious thing and give me a hard
name.
Still, a man who has found the use of his
legs, has a right to go aside a little and
crow because of his liberty. I like to do so.
I sometimes go to the top of Mount Tom
and look south to the spires of Fair Haven
and to the Sound; east to the passes which
lead through the mountains into the valley of
the Connecticut; north to the spires of Meriden, and to the hills of Berlin where the poet
Percival was born; west to the hills of Prospect, where Roaring Brook, poetized by
Willis, pours its small flood over the stairs of
trap-rock, and runs away between the cliffs of
sand-stone. I do this in order to partly realize the extent of the domain which I hold by
the right of eyes and the right of legs. I exult a little over it, for its harvests will await
my gathering and its fabrics will improve by
being kept out of the market.
But if a man brags much, or rides his hobby
faster than a walk, he is, 1 notice, pretty
sure to get some experience that will never




NIGHT- WALhKING.           89
be pleasant except when remembered and told
of. A long compulsory night-walk with the
accompaniment of darkness, or mud,. or rain,
or ice, is one of the straits into which a daring walker is often betrayed. What does a
man know about peaches until he has cracked
the stone and eaten the bitter kernel, or of
honey, until he has tasted the bee-bread? The
pedestrian has never supped on wild meats until he has done some
NIGHT-WALKING.
The man wlio comes home in the darkness
is not the same one who went forth in the morning light. The ideas of a night-walker are
hung with shadows. If his thought is luminous, it is with such light as comes from the
fox-fire in my wood-yard; but he has keen
senses and some modes of procedure peculiar to himself. I have noticed in the night
that a man's cheek is the first to warn
him of the presence of some object near his
head.  His legs act automatically, and he
can walk further than he could by day. I of



90             FO0 T NO TES
ten turn my attention toward my legs, and
wonder who it is that has been running that
machinery. I have been surprised by unexpectedly reaching some point on a familiar
road, and I could account for my early arrival, only by supposing that I had been asleep
while my legs had kept on at work.
The eyes of a night-walker are often small
help, except to guide him into the middle of
the road where the dust and mud are deepest-and where he finds the surest footing;
nevertheless, by the help of the smell and
other senses, he manages to pick up many a
bit of knowledge that would otherwise have
remained ungleaned. By tasting of the leaves
and twigs of trees and shrubs in the night, a
man can do something to cure his knowledge
of its one-sidedness.
The premises of Dennis St. Patrick are unsightly enough by day, but in the night I get
such whiffs of air from his sty, that I am ever
after constrained to choose other roads. In
warm weather the brooks which creep out
from among the willows and alders and run
under bridges, and the Quinnipiac a quarter




NIGHT- WALKING.            91
of a mile off, appeal to my nose with an odor
like the taste of fresh-water clams eaten raw.
In the harvest months, the meadows and the
fields of grain-stubble advertize themselves to
the late walker; and there is the smell of full
barns. The early fruit in the orchards, and
the heaps ot apples at the cider-mills, offer up
incense to Pomona in the night, and tempt
me to infractions of the decalogue. In the
winter and early spring-time I get many good
smells from the fresh-cut wood-piles by the
road and in the farmers' yards. The stenches
from slaughter-houses and bone-mills are borne
along the earth to the leeward in narrow
streams scarcely wider than their sources;
but they are nothing to the walker if he holds
his nose. On entering a house from a walk
in a winter night, I often perceive an unsavoriness that prevents me from  thinking at
once of sweet home. In summer nights 1 often breathe perfumes that are strange, mystic,
and wondrously sweet. I think them breaths
of spicery from over the sea; I think them
the odors of all flowers swept together and
mixed by nature's most cunning pharmacy;




92             FOOT NOTES.
they'have about them the grandeur of the
night and the majesty of the darkness wherein 1 walk, and I am too happy and reverent
to enter on the inquiries prompted by my intellect.
A night-walk over an undulating road gives
one a succession of warm and cold air-baths.
Passing through a hollow is often like fording
a stream. On the way to New Haven I
pass a farm, the night air of which is always
like a bath of ice-water to my face. A man
intending to locate a house, or to select a
farm, should do some night-walking if he is
looking for a place where his melons and
grapes can gather sweetness in the' dark.
I am a good deal impressed by the sense
of security that lets people lie down and sleep
with nothing but a pine door between them
and the outer world of darkness.  Father,
wife, and children, with upturned throats,
muscular and shaggy, fair and white, short
and pulpy, all sleep in perfect assurance that
the great all means them no harm. If I had
diamonds to convey, I think I would carry
them in the night, and go on foot. Still, I




NIGH T- WALKING.           93
have not entirely cast off the vague terror
that fills the darkness with shadowy hands
that may clutch me from behind.
In the night the human spirit is withdrawn
from the spaces it has filled by day, and a
man finds the most complete solitude, and
liberty to touch things for himself. I never
feel bashful when I walk in the night. The
shy  and shrinking author of the  Marble
Faun, was a lover of gloom, and at one time
walked only at night. A day-walker will
put daylight into his work, but a walker in
the darkness can hardly fail to fill his writing
with dusky thought. The hooting of the owl,
the solitary carriage that rushes on me from
out the blackness, and then rushes into it
again, making a faint crescendo and diminuendo, these, and all the noises of the night,
never break the solitude, but seem rather a
part of it.
Calling in the night at lonely houses, often
gives a man a taste of strange experiences.
It is a small thing to ask for a cup of water,
but you always drink weirdness with it; and
a faint feeling which is born of the night, rip



94             FO0 T NOTE:S.
ples along your nerves. Long before midnight on country roads, nearly all lights are
put out.  Those that remain are unearthly
and flitting as ignes fatui.  Attracted by a
gleam of light upon the trees or out-buildings
I turn up to a house and the light disappears.
I go on my way again, and the flame shines
out in some other part of the building. If
the building is large, old, and strange, I can,
notwithstanding my nineteenth-century skepticism and common sense, always feel a slight
disposition to people'it with a goblin brood.
I once called at a dark house to inquire my
way.  Standing in the black square of his
door-way, a man with one tone gave me the
needful directions, and with another he restrained and pacified some mad woman, who
darted horror into my veins by frantically
commanding me to neither leave anything
nor take anything away.
The night-walker travels among enchantments; and it is a long time before he can
pass over a road and see things in their daylight relations. Road-side knolls arem mountains on the horizon, and the large houses are




NIGHIT- WALKING.          95
all palatial. This great white house, standing
among trees near the sea, is, I am certain, the
home of those men and women I have been
seeking, a courtly and loving people, who live
above care, and whose lives are inspired
poems. To-morrow I find that plain Peter
Hogeboom lives in that house, and that he
believes in little except money, and beefsteaks,
-and his farm.
As at the close of a market-day we count
our remaining coins, to see if we can make
that other needful purchase; so at the first
hint of a night-walk we count our forces; we
draw up and straighten out our legs, moving
them sideways, to see what elasticity is left
in them, and we note that spot at the pit of
the stomach to see if, pluck and courage are
at home. A failure to get back to your base
of operations on the day of your departure
is what will make your walk a little too
piquant. If your energy fails before getting
home, there are some expedients to be tried.
In harvest-time it is a small matter to turn
aside into a meadow and sleep under the trees,
with a covering of new hay, and the stars




96             FOOT  NO TES.
above you. But sleeping out of doors is not
always possible. Nearly all the wayside barns
keep open doors, and good sleep can be had
on the piles of hay and straw. The tramps
tell me that they always sleep warmly covered with hay. I know that sleeping in barns
is felt to be a rather gross affair; but the
other day I had occasion to dig down to the
bottom of my bed, and there I found a large
flattened sack filled with straw. It occurred
to me then that instead of sending me to the
barn to  sleep, somebody  had  brought a
piece of the barn into the house for me to
lodge on: in fact, it seemed to me that with
the addition of sundry sheets and blankets, I,
too, was sleeping on my straw like any vagabond. I had in one place got to the bottom
of civilized society, and had found barbarism
there. I dare not dig to the bottom of a good
many other things for fear' I shall find something there which I can not respect.
There are, I admit, some drawbacks to
sleeping in a barn.  If I sleep in one belong'ing to a man who only knows me by
sight, I am sure, if I meet him in the morn



NIGHT- WALKING.           97
ing, to feel his thought:  "Habits not so
good as I supposed; queer, at any rate."  If
a stranger finds me sleeping in his barn, I
know he will be speculating as to the time
I was taken with vagabondage, and whether
it is yet possible for me to be lifted into
good farm  society.  What is the use of my
making explanations to him? He is not expected to know or believe that my little
white house under the maple-trees has green
blinds; that a brass plate with my name on
it, is on the front door, and that this plate is
rubbed every morning. How should he know
that the butcher, the fish-man and the milkman are all polite to me; and that the minister, the doctor, the judge and the colonel,
sometimes find time to talk with me on
business; in fact, how should that man know
that I am a respectable person, sleeping in
his barn?
Men who stay at home appear to dwell
behind intrenchments; they are fortified by
physical comforts, conveniences, and the respect of their neighbors.  But when a man
goes a walking among strangers, he has to
7




98             FO OT NO TES.
leave his defenses.  There is hardly a man
so famous but a twelve-mile walk will leave
him quite defenseless, and exposed to attacks
in the rear.  I even suffer when abroad,
knowing that I am  estimated by feet and
inches, pounds avoirdupoise, and supposed
ability to pay. I have seen very respectable
people quite crest-fallen and angry when they
had gotten too far from their trenches.  My
neighbor Oakley, is agent for the highly solvent Indian Phalanx. He was once in New
York and could not get a credit for thirty
days.  Irritated  by finding himself beyond
his intrenchments, he said to the merchant
with angry dignity, his chin well up and
head rolling a little from  side to side-" I
guess you don't know who we are!"
I once slept in the woods in company with.
a friend, and in the morning when we were
getting our breakfast, a man came along and
intimated that our potatoes probably came
from some missing hills in his field near by.
I wish to say here to the whole world that
those potatoes were not stolen. I had brought
them  from  home; they were raised in my




NIGHT- WALKING.           99
brother's garden, and for earliness and dryness they surpassed any potatoes which that
man ever raised, unless he had more of the
nineteenth century in him than I think he
had. My friend however has something about
him which enables him to travel a great way
from his base of operations. I think he goes
armed with a kind of politeness and selfrespect. With injured innocence and wounded dignity mixed with surprise, he said to
the man worried about potatoes, "If you
were acquainted with us, I think you would
not suspect us of stealing."  That vigilant
raiser of potatoes subsided at once. My friend
is an orderly man, and he always sleeps at
home.  His three children are in the same
room with him; the two eldest in a trucklebed, and the youngest in a crib; the servantgirl is within easy call, and the doctor is
within ten-minutes' ride. But then, how could
that farmer have known how respectable we
were at home, and thus have kept from  insulting us?
If a walker fails to get home, and does not
like either of the above modes of spending




Ioo            FOO T IVOTES.
the night, he can, as a last resort, rouse up
some householder, and, in the name of cash
payment, beg lodging of the startled man.
Asking at strange houses for entertainment in
the name of human brotherhood, is not much
in vogue just now; indeed, it is hardly practicable, unless one carry with him a good deal
more of brotherhood than is expedient at
present. I should prefer, however, to carry my
heart instead of a purse, when I go abroad.




X.
LIKE to bask in the presence of
things, turning my broadest surface
toward them  to feel their reaction.
A walker who cannot do this, has only half
learned his trade. Why should I spend all
my time in eagerly questioning this pine tree,
or that bird in the bush? I have counted the
spots on the shell of a terrapin; I have measured the stems of oak leaves; 1 have put my
tongue to the under side of the apples on
my tree to taste the salt which the southeast rain has brought from the sea; I have
listened to the singing of the locusts, and
have found that they begin with a crescendo,
quickening the time as they proceed; that
they end with a diminuendo, gradually dragging the time; and that their tune is an opus
of wonderful symmetry.  By such work a
man will in time gather a respectable sheaf
of gleanings, which in some sense is all his
own. But it often happens that the walker




I02            FO 0 T VO TES.
brings home things better than those he sought
after with so much pains. I have found that
nature best likes my passive side; hereafter
I shall try to indulge her. If we are reverent and receptive enough, one place is about
as good for a walk as another. I have yet
to find the person, no matter how ill-informed
or narrow-minded he may be, who is modest
enough to confess that the European tour
would be too big a thing for him; but I have
seen many people who felt hemmed in at
home because they were blind to what was
near by, and because they could not make a
foreign journey. For the benefit of this suffering class, I will say that I often find myself'
in very foreign parts when I walk in
AN OLD PASTURE.
A man about to go to England on pleasure,
would do well to turn aside into this old
grazing place, and re-consider his conclusion
that he stands in need of something alien.
Should he do so he might find that at present
he has no time for any country except Connecticut.  I have in time past lusted after




AN OLD PASTURE.           Io3
English lanes and Scotch heather; but when
I have walked in this pasture, I have been
made ashamed of that lust, and, repenting of
it to the very core of me, I now hold that.
desire in check.
It is not easy to fix the exact age of an
old field. This town has been settled one
hundred and ninety-five years, and some of
its old farm-houses are said to be a hundred
and fifty years old. A man who inquires
about the ages of these old houses, soon finds
himself in a fog. But this pasture is without
doubt old enough to have seen some experiences.
It is separated from the road by a low
stone wall, surmounted by a line of chestnut
rails; across these at regular intervals, are
set pairs of chestnut stakes which support
another course of rails.  The whole fence is
painted with lichens, those on the wood-work
being quite as large and numerous as those
upon the stones. A long line of mossy stones
in the bushes, marks the site of a wall which
once divided the pasture, and intimates that
the lot was once held by two exclusive claim



104            FOOT NO TES.
ants, or that one part of it was thought too
good to associate with the other.  Two or
three gray cattle-paths radiate from the barway. Under the large trees and alongside the
neighboring wood are some bare spots of
earth, made by the cattle going there to ruminate, to fight flies, and to snatch bites of
leaves from the overhanging branches. A few
tufts of grass and weeds ranker than the rest,
spring up here and there and mark the places
enriched by the ordure of the cows.  One
corner richer than the others and fenced off
with new rails, has been plowed by some one
in hopes of getting turnips and potatoes.
This pasture has been put to nobler uses,
for it is everywhere rough with old corn-hills.
But the last man brown with tan, who bared
his arm and bent his back to the sun to hoe
corn here, doubtless found the crop inadequate, for the ground was left without smoothing, and the whole field has gone its own
way. Mr. Hokum, who reads an agricultural
paper, always hisses at it.  It is now  quite
half-grown up with trees and shrubs and
briars. Patches of pale; reddish-green whor



AN OLD PASTURE.           10o5
tleberry bushes, and dusky-green sweet-fern;
round-headed  bayberry-bushes, looking like
pincushions of dark-green velvet, and blackberry briars a good deal browsed by the
cattle; white spots of St. Peterswort, and
some plats of grass, green in the spring, but
on this dry August day, brown and parched;
clumps of white birches, red cedars everywhere, and light-green junipers standing all
about like huge saucers. I have looked on
the old pasture from an eminence and thought
it a table set with dishes for a banquet. In
the wet places are soft maples, alders, bushes
of feverfew, poison  sumach, skunk-cabbage,
and miry paths among the tussucks of wild
grass. But this wild and deserted bush-picture
is not yet given over to despair. It still has
a bright destiny. It lies fair; and if helped
to a little muck and guano, it could be made
to blush with sweet red clover.
For intricacy and-variety, an old grown-up
pasture is incomparable.  Its shrubbery and
grouping of trees often make me ashamed of
our most studiously planted lawns; these are
so tame and feeble. This old pasture always




Io6            FO0 T NO TES.
appears like a fairy garden waiting for my
house to be built in it. But then I suppose
the building of a house there would at once
destroy its fine order, and then the landscape
gardener would have to be called in to patch
up some sort of harmony between house and
grounds.
The cattle sometimes do a bit of topiary
work in a pasture. Near where I walk is an
apple-tree which has, between vigorous sprouting and a good deal of annual browsing, at
last become a dense and regular cone nearly
six feet high. After years of struggle it has
become. self-protecting; it has now shot up
many vigorous shoots, and bids fair to have
a great head and to see years of fruitfulness.
It is the best example of out-growing repeated disaster that I think of just now; and I always give heed to its word of wisdom.
I often come across the cattle in this pasture; like myself they get a somewhat varied
refreshment, for they are not expected to eat
much plain herds-grass and clover. As the
years creep on. the cows will find less and
less entertainment there, and unless the ax




AN OLD PASTURE.            Io7
interferes in their favor, this old feeding-place
will be given over to the woodchucks, the
rabbits and the squirrels. The men of Connecticut have been doing battle with the trees
for upwards of twvo hundred years; but the
spirit of the forest does not yet show the
least sign of surrender. If a farmer neglects
his pasture for an instant the forest puts forth
its old claim to the land. The forest is so indomitable and so perfectly organized, that it
always has its pioneer trees ready to go forward and take possession of an old field, no
matter how exhausted it may be. Here in
Connecticut the red cedar and white birch
serve as the advance guard of the forest in
its re-occupation of worn-out lands..
The number of aromatic trees and plants in
one of our pastures is somewhat remarkable.
Here are black birches, red cedar, juniper and
sassafras, and bayberry, and the spice-bush,
cudweed, skunk-cabbage and sweet-fern. An
old pasture breathing out incense, has a perfumed atmosphere, full of poesy and stimulus
to artistic endeavor. I am not surprised that
the men who frequented these New England




I o8           FOO0 T NO TES.
pastures in their boyhood, are now doing a disproportionate amount of the country's literary
work. These pastures are so rich in spicery,
I wonder at the short-sightedness of people
who imagine the prairies to be uncommonly
fertile. A man who has sweet-fern in his back
lots, need not go to the lands of myrrh and
cinnamon in order to find something to spice
his thought, or make his life a richer wine.




XI.
S HE  fields are always good walking
places; so are the roads when the
object of your expedition is distant;
and so also are the streets of a town. But a
man may not like to walk much where there
are dense crowds of men; he may prefer
to go by himself among the oak trees and
golden-rods; still I always like to feel the
human element about me, and I have pleasure
in all the signs of man's coming and going.
In this old town it is not possible to escape
these signs for an instant.  Half the forest
trees are now growing from stumps left by
some forgotten ax-man. And the most I can
learn about him is, that he was a considerate
man, and that he always let his wits precede
the act of his hand; for his stumps were all
left low, to encourage the growth of a new
forest. What sort of a naturalist is he who




I IO           FOOT NOTES.
flies from society to nature, trying to ignore
man?  Men have their place in nature as
well as the woodchucks, and their habits deserve to be studied, even if we only succeed
in looking upon them as bats and moles, or
at best as a colony of muskrats, having a
wonderful providence and industry.  It is
because I love this human element, that I am
always glad of a chance to walk in
THE FOOT-PATHS.
1 think Connecticut is somewhat remarkable
for these signs of pedestrianism.  They are
to be found everywhere.  The Quinnipiac is
a good deal obstructed by dams which hold
the water back in ponds. Near these ponds
are large shops in which I see men at work
in the din and dirt. Foot-paths radiate from
these working places and stretch away through
the fields and along the roadsides. If I walk
in these paths early enough or late enough,
I meet solitary men whom I suppose to be
the ones employed in these shops.
The amount of human interest that is strung
on a foot-path like beads on a string, is im



THE F00 T-PA THS.         I I
mense. If the soles of my feet ever itch, it
is when I discover some new path; the least
probability that it will lead me toward my
destination is enough to allure'me from the
right'way. The woodchuck's path, leading
out from his hole and heap of gravel into
the red clover, has interest; so has the muskrat's path, where it goes down the bank into
the water; but an old foot-path in which
men and women and children have walked
for years, following its course up and down,
in and out, through the fields!
These paths are seldom wide enough except
for one pair of feet at a time. They have
been made by men who walked alone, and
who for once were looking at things through
their own eyes.  If these by-ways have ever
been the scenes of much sociality, it has been
such intercourse as men have one with another face to back, the one aiming his speech
at the rear of his listener's head, and the
other flirting his words backward over his
shoulder.
These foot-paths have been made by tired
and busy men, who have only cared for the




I I2            FOOT NC'TEES.
shortest and easiest ways. It is therefore interesting to note how a path finally gets established in just the best place and leaves no room for
new engineering. An old path electrifies a
man's weary legs, it is so charged with energy
and purpose.  Notwithstanding all its directness, a foot-path often finds ways to put on
grace and lead you through enchantments:
still, it never once loses sight of its purpose.
My path leads me across a brook on a plank,
and over an old rail fence, worn smooth by
many crossings; then it creeps along under
the edge of a wood, over the naked roots, and
glides down a bank; and taking me over a
gully on another plank, it finally lets me out
through a bar-way into the great high-road.
This miners'-path dips down into a meadow
and goes among the daisies, ox-eyes, and the
meadow-pinks, and then it winds up a hill on
the opposite side. Clothed in the beauty of
simple earnestness, both these paths do something to cure me of nonsense.  I see many
roadside paths marked off from  the wagontrack by a green ribbon of grass. They go
out of sight in the hollows, reappear again
on the other side, and finally vanish where




ABOUT OX-TEAMSTERS.          I I3
the great road disappears under the distant
trees; they all have some of the highway's
steady straightforwardness.
I have traveled some in highways, especially
those of politics and business; and I have found
them dusty. I still find it necessary to travel
in those roads, but I shall not promise to say
what I see in them. When I can find a sidepath or a by-way, I intend to walk in it and
make note of what I discover.
Among the pedestrians I see walking in the
foot-paths which stretch along the carriageroads, I find some who deserve mention. They
are the men who drive oxen. To speak exactly, they are not pedestrians, neither are
they riders; though I often see them a-top of
their carts, and witness their heads jerking
from side to side as the wheels jolt over the
stones. However, the sight of'them is suggestive, and I propose, therefore, to mention
some things which I do not recollect that any
one has ever said
ABOUT OX-TEAMSTERS.
Ox-teaming in the United States is, I notice,
8




I I4          FOOT NOTES.
pretty much confined to the region east of the
Hudson. The poor whites of North Carolina
sometimes work a single ox harnessed into a
cart. At Racine, on Lake Michigan, I once
saw the Bohemians drawing their produce to
market with cows yoked together like oxen.
In New York, a bit of New England management may occasionally be seen cropping out
in the shape of a farmer doing business with
oxen. But after all, your real ox-teamster is
a Yankee.;
A Yankee farmer gets some lessons in mesthetics while carefully selecting and matching
oxen. The other day a yoke of these wellmatched creatures came tramping through my
lawn and over the flower-beds; and I was not
at all angry at them, they were so handsome,
and took their liberty so gracefully, just as
handsome people do. I often meet a farmer
walking opposite the shoulders of a briskly
stepping pair of red cattle, whose long and
tapering white horns, tipped with brass balls,
curve gracefully upward and outward like
the sides of a classic vase, and I stop as
often to observe the pageantry.




ABOUT OX-TEAMISTERS.        II5
The tact of an experienced ox-teamster is
certainly no small thing.  By means of a
few movements of his whip, and by a word
or two, he holds his team by a thread as
subtile as that between the magnetizer and
subject. It is easy to find a boy who will at
once learn to drive a horse; but in order to
make a first-rate ox-teamster, a boy should
have something superior about him. A skilled
teamster, if needs be, knows how to join two
carts into a sort of wagon; he knows how
to make his oxen help him  load the great
logs upon his sled in winter; and in twenty
ways he learns how to make his skill compensate for the slowness of his team.
The Yankees brag a good deal about one
thing and another: they brag of their schoolhouses, they brag because they write the
books, and because they start the reforms; they
brag of an ancestral piety, they brag of their
enterprise, and they brag because they know
how to do the best thing every time. But
when I see them making use of oxen to carry
on important manufacturing enterprises, I
say, "Why will you brag so?"  Still I sup



Ii6             FOOT NO7ES.
pose the teamster's brain is going all the
faster when he strides on ahead, and circling
his whip round and round with a slow grace,
awaits the lazy pace of his team. And after
all, that enterprise is the best which is always
so beforehand with events that it can make use
of the most leisurely and slow-going agents.
The Yankee who does business with oxen,
is your truest man of Nevw England; it is he
who rests at the bottom of its stability and
prosperity.  He is, I conclude, more local'and less cosmopolitan in his tastes and attachments, than any other man in his neighborhood. I am a Vermonter, and I was born in
Hampshire Corner, a place well known to its
inhabitants. Of the farmers vwho lived there
when I was born, a part used horses, and the
rest had oxen.   The horse-men' have. all
floated away from there to find new homes and
live by new creeds, while those ox-teamsters
were at last accounts still holding on to the
old place, and taking life pretty much as they
found it. But don't let me be charged with
calling ox-teamsters unprogressive, for I have
not said it.




XII.
DON'T  meet a great many  men
when I walk in the roadside paths.
One naturally expects the contrary.
It is true I see the over-fed rich man and the
over-fed vagabond; the active business man,
and the well-to-do farmer, who feel able to
have their own teams; I also meet the mechanic and some other men, who drive hired
horses because they are too poor to be seen
going afoot.  Altogether there is not more
than a score of representative men whom I
know. I became tired a long time ago of
traveling by rail, for I found that the same
man and woman did' about all the riding.
When the soldier first began riding on the
cars, I enjoyed the railroad again. I like to
meet a new man; for this reason I am on
the alert to extend my acquaintance. Some
years ago I lay in wait near the Neuse river




I I8           FOOT NOTES.
in North Carolina for new men and women.
One of the most notable persons I found was
A PINEY-WOODS WOMAN ON THE MARCH.
She is in some sense a well-known person,
having more than once made her appearance
on the pages of an author. It is for this reason I wish to speak of her somewhat exactly
as I saw her on that day when she emerged
from the unknown, endured my eye-shot for a
moment, and then passed o'n again into the unknown.
She was tall, lean and sallow; her dress was
made of some dingy cotton stuff; on her head
she wore a sun-bonnet without starch; on
her shoulder she bore the gun always so
ready to bring aid to the slave-owner; she
was barefooted, and when she walked she did
it manfully, her heels lifting her scanty skirt
behind and her knees making vigorous thrusts
against it before. She was preceded by two
dogs and followed by a horse and cart which
carried her husband-a little sallow man, who
looked a good deal frozen-and-thawed by the




A PINE Y-WOODS WOMAN.        II19
fever-and-ague -two or three children, a chest,
a few rude chairs, some slight tokens of bedding, and a few cooking utensils; altogether
she had a smaller load of goods than a family
thinks necessary when it spends a night at
the sea-shore. The horse was in as good condition as a small measure of fodder and a few
ears of corn could keep him. The harness
was made entirely of ropes, with the exception of the back-pad and collar, which were
made of wood. The cart, with the exception
of the wheels, was such a thing as men make
when they fashion their materials from first to
last with no other tools but an ax, a hammer
and an auger.
The planter who stood there with me, looked at that woman and her family with such
scorn as the chivalry are wont to regard
those poor whites; but I gave her the attention which is not wholly sympathy, and took
note of her and all she had. Although 1
have spoken of the woman with such minu'teness, I do not wish to be suspected of
intimating that she was not a civilized person.
Other men who have paraded her in litera.



120            FOOT NOTES.
ture, have done enough of that sort of hinting.
I will admit that she did not seem to wholly
understand the art of getting a living.  I
think we Yankees have bragged a little too
much because we are  so comfortable, and
know  so well how  to get a living.  I have
seen people who might be called perfect in
the trade of foraging, but- I don't know as
I could call them  civilized.  I think people
talk a good deal as if progress in civilization
meant but little more than the moving out
of a hut into a palace, or the substitution
of a silver fork for a steel one.  I have
great respect for the business of getting a
living. The way in which some people carry
it on is almost sublime; it involves so much
carpentry and upholstery, so many servants,
so great resources, and a commerce so widespread.
But I meet some folks who don't seem  to
understand much else, and I find it hard to
talk with them, their knowledge and mine are
so dissimilar. If it is necessary I will fight
the wolf at the door, and I will give my
whole thought to getting much food and rai



A PINEY- WOODS WOMAN.         121
ment; but if I succeed in doing no more
than that, I won't brag about my civilization.
Though I am a tramp, and though I wear a
shaggy coat, and carry all my goods in my
knapsack, still if I have beaten the savage in
me, and can join my fellows in a loving and
unselfish cooperation, I am a more civilized
man than is he who has only achieved the
ability to eat with his own stilver fork. Nevertheless I imagine that the truest civilization
vill include a silver fork for me and mine.




XIII.
N  whatever road I walk, I always
fl.(W   find men; and I detect signs of
them far beyond the places I ever
reach; in short, I find men everywhere.  I
know of only one writer besides myself, who
appears to have ever noticed this fact. I see
men living in houses which look out on
meadows watered by brooks; again I see
them  dwelling in back places a good deal
surrounded by old grown-up pastures; I discover them along the foot of the mountains,
where the days are clipped a little by the
great shadows.  Men can be found driving
oxen along the wood-roads that lead up the
sides of Mt. Beseck.  I find them  milking
pcows, going a-field and grooming animals. I
often observe them in their doors, sitting
there as comfortably, perhaps, as the woodchuck at his hole. There does not appear to




iIEN.                 123
be any place so barren, or any crevice among
the hills so narrow as to prevent some man
from occupying it, and there attempting in
some way to cipher through his book of
problems, perhaps like a poor scholar wholly
skipping the hard ones.
People who come at their conclusions a
little prematurely, are apt to feel that there
are too many men. Such folks think that
nature need not have so many rerterations
of the same idea. By looking a little closely
into the matter, I find that nature never repeats. Every man has a flavor of originality
about him, that fully excuses him for being
here. This man who lives in a back neighborhood, may be farming in the old rut just
like his neighbors, but before I get away
from him I find that he is raising dogs of a
breed somewhat rare. That other man has a
curious squash in his garden, the seed of
which was brought from the indefinite somewhere. The sight of that squash incites me
to rush out of my small sphere into the
great circle of things to make discoveries.
A man is pretty sure to get some original



I 24           FO 0 T NO TES.
ity from the patch of earth he occupies.
The one who lives on Wallingford plain
tells me how to reclaim the nakedest piece
of drifting sand, by planting  it with the
acorns of yellow oak.
I like to go among the men who live in
obscure places; men who dress rustily and
don't lead the life of towns; who speak a
language of their own, and who are unfashioned by high schools and dictionaries. These
men have a flavor about them like chokecherries and wild-apples. But I am  not so
curious about these men's names as I am
about the names of unfamiliar oaks, for the
names of men are not scientific. Such men
often talk to me of having been in towns and
far-off places, but I do not readily associate
them with cities, nor are they any more cosmopolitan to me, than are the trees that grow
on their farms.
I am much impressed with the beauty of
the men who live in by-places, and on the
frontiers. Theirs is not the beauty which
looks well in towns and in a fine house, but
it is a neutral-tinted sort which exactly har



MEN.                125
monizes with the woods and fields.  I find
these men living in houses which do not need
a landscape gardener to marry them to nature. These houses are without art, yet they
have something which art is glad to borrow.
I have traveled in the new States and have seen
the costly dwellings of the rich and prosperous. I have seen the unpretending log-house
with its back ground of forest. But my imagination was set more warmly aglow by the
cabins; they had such a oneness with their
surroundings. The nest of a blue-jay which
he builds of twigs in a cluster of saplings,
springing up from a small stump, scarcely
has a more complete harmony with nature
than some of the houses which are built by the
backwoodsmen and people who have hardly
dreamed of art.
Men everywhere appear intent on bettering
their condition, and I think they succeed to
some extent in their attempts, for I frequently
see them moving into larger and more gaily
painted houses.  Nevertheless, if one only
gets near enough to men he will be pretty
sure to hear them grumble about the difficulty
of getting a living.  To think of a wood



12 6           FOOT NOTES.
chuck complaining of the scarcity of beanfields, or of his distance from a clover-lot, or
because he has no time to sit on the heap of
earth at the mouth of his hole! I often hear
him growl, but I don't think he means to
say he finds it hard work to get a living. If
men would first attend to some of their
higher needs, they would be excusable though
they were a little shiftless in the business
of getting a living; at least, they might go
about their work a little more gaily than many
now do.
The men whom I find in the spaces around
me, are ready enough to talk of the infinite
and of their relations to it. On certain days
I often see people going to some town to
hear something about the infinite  mystery
which envelops us, and to do something about
the great fear and longing that fills them.
Nearly every man, I notice, has come at
some formula by which he is attempting to
make life and the universe intelligible to himself, and he is apt to look suspiciously at his
neighbor's formula. If I enunciate my creed
to a man he will either feel slightly angered,
or he will look confused with the idea that




MEN.                 127
there can possibly be any other creed but his
own. There are men who tell me that I am
dealing with the unknowable when I attempt
to span and express the infinite mystery
which is concerned in what we call religion.
Perhaps we don't know, and perhaps we can't
know; I imagine a child does not know its
mother very well, but I am certain it comprehends her paps and feels her arms. If I
can only come at the breasts of the universe
and feel the arms of the All-supporting, I
will be content with a very small creed, for
I know I shall be cured of my anguish and
get my hunger appeased.
Wherever I find a man I generally find a
woman too.  "It is," as the vagabond said,
"a man and woman everywhere." I see a little spindle-legged and flaccid man, dwelling
with a deep-breasted woman who furnishes energy for both; and I think that nature takes
care to have some of the manly qualities in
every house. I sometimes go in swimming
with one of these husbands, and I feel that I
am in a delicate situation, as if he were a
woman. With the man I often see the wife
who no longer thinks it of use to be attrac



T28            FOOT NOTES.
tive and so strikes her colors; I find the son
who thinks his enterprise and courage are
things to unbar every door and compel success; and there is the daughter who has faith
in love and beauty and the coming man, and
who finds means to be attractive without even
intending to be so; I also see the little people
who don't think much about themselves, but
who do think about you. I was once traveling with a knapsack on my back, when such
articles were not common. A little boy followed me, to ask many questions about
myself and sack. Finally with a child-like
plaintiveness he inquired, "Have you got any
folks?"  "Yes," said I, wishing to be thought
well of, "two hundred and fifty of them!"
This satisfied the youngster's anxiety about
me and he went back to his mother.
A man may go among men and only look
at them as he does at the trees and stones.
But if a man of this habit gets near enough
to the men he finds in strange fields, he will
get their half-confidences and self-revealings
and these will somewhat complicate his observations and fill him with surprise as if spoken
to by the rocks.




MEN.                  129
Most men hold their opinions somewhat
privately and they guard them as they do the
tender spots in their bodies. A man opens
his mind cautiously as he does his wallet in
a crowd, and if he shows his belief, he does
it in the same manner in which he speaks of
his loves. This man gives me his opinion as
if it were a China vase, first handling it very
carefully himself, and by some means learning
that I will not ruthlessly smash it. That man
and I have hostile beliefs. We sit together
on a log in his wood-yard and whittle sticks,
occasionally shoving our knife-blades into the
bark of the log. He very quietly marches
out his armed opinion. I lead out mine as
coolly: Our two little opinions-they are
world-wide opinions, however, and have fought
many a time before-they look at each other
for a moment, and carefully measure lances,
as merchants do cloths. The one finds his
weapon too short; and there is no battle; nor
will there ever be one, for one of us has suffered defeat without a battle.
I think strange men are apt to make bungling work in their business of being agreeable
9




I30            EOOT NOTES.
to one another.  I encounter men, the taste
of whom puckers my mouth like a green persimmon. Men can't always find ways to be
fresh to one another.  I am  not at all sure
that my freshness will be palatable to my
man, for people often behave as if the flavor
of me was as insipid as an untimely melon.
There are a great many men who seem as dry
as chestnut-rails; yet these men have a green
spot about them and some little remnant of
enthusiasm. A man, I notice, rather likes to
have you find out his juiciness; he may not
thank you for it, but he will think you a
good fellow  to talk to.  But discourse with
all sorts of men, has its perils; if I have
speech with trees and such natural things as
stand by themselves, I am  refreshed.  Men
are always more than they seem. When well
inspected they prove to be so many openings
into the spiritual spheres. I can't say though,
as I have ever found any sons of perdition,
but I do sometimes find men with whom it
were better to have no contact.




XIV.
31T.UNDAY is, I think, a good time for
walking; I have liberty to walk then,
____l_ when people have thrown down their
tools and gone into a sort of collapse.  But
Sunday is a hard day for a lazy man; it is
a poor time  to  sleep.  I am  inclined to
think that a close scrutiny would reveal the
fact that Sunday, as now spent, is the most
pagan day in the week.  It is a tiresome
one for an earnest man, he is so much
weighted down by a..stagnation not his own.
I intend to make my Sundays work for my
most important interests, for I can not well
afford to lose one day every week.  I like
to keep in with the powers which make
my cabbages grow juist as fast on Sunday
as on any other day; so I walk as much as
I like on that day. By so doing I find that
I sprout a newish idea once in a while, and I
don't fall behind my beets and onions.




32             FOOT NOT7'ES.
When I walk on Sunday I have the country pretty much to myself, for the people are
mostly dozing at home or nodding in the
churches., Still I find a great many boys in
some places. I can't say that I like to meet
them on this day. I have been a pedagogue,
and I once had the benefit of Sunday schools;
I think these things have fashioned me a little, for I feel a great aversion to having boys
left around on Sunday, or on any other day.
Indeed I find it is not easy for a man to look
at things except through the special goggles
of some particular craft.  In the spring I
everywhere meet boys carrying and nibbling
small branches of
THE BIRCH  TREE.
As teacher and as one taught, I have in
one way or another had an acquaintance.
with birch sufficient to warrant me in talking
about it.  The birch tree is widely disseminated, and it generally prefers a moist and
cool situation.  During the  season of my
unrest, and before I began traveling in earnest, I wandered somewhat more widely than




THE BIR CH 7 IEE.          I33
is absolutely  necessary for a man, but I do
not remember any place that did not have
some species of birch.
The white birch grows in places higher up
the Alps, and farther north than any other
tree. I find it growing in the naked sand on
Wallingford  plain, where the farmers have
planted it in belts to keep the wind from
blowing away their farms. If it once gets
rooted in the sand, it holds on and continues
to make a small yearly growth. The Finns - I
have it on the authority of a learned work —
drink a tea made from the leaves of the
white birch.  My family and I have drunk
birch tea unto the bitter end; we don't drink
it now.
The birches are characterized by great
lightness or sprightliness.  To be sure the
wood is not light, nor is the timber of the
black birch lightly esteemed by cabinetmakers. The yellow birch, when standing on
the edge of a forest, has a peculiarly light
and graceful effect.  Its long and  slender
limbs, bearing a thin foliage, appear to float
upon the atmosphere as airily as a lily-pad




I34             FOOT NO TES.
upon the water. This birch seems endowed
with an instinct to perch on the high places
like a bird. On the top of the Green Mountains it is almost the only deciduous tree,
growing there with the black spruce and fir.
I have often seen a birch tree standing on a
large bowlder, where it stretched its long
roots down to the soil at the foot of the
rock, and clasped the stone as with a claw.
It may frequently be seen growing in the
earth among the roots of an upturned tree.
I once saw a birch that had taken root on
the tall stump of a tree that had been broken
off by the wind.  The lightest sort of boats
are made from the bark of the canoe-birch.
The small limbs of this tree are a good deal
used by country teachers in order to make
heavy youths step a little more lightly along
the course of science.  In places where the
chinquapin,  or dwarf-chestnut,  grows,  it
takes the place of birch in the schools. Notwithstanding its bad associations, the birch is
still in good odor with the boys, and in the
spring-time they always gnaw  away at its
aromatic bark with great avidity.




SUMMER.                 3 5
Our summer is the torrid zone of the year,
and like the equatorial regions of the earth
it lies a good deal unexplored.  I notice
that people don't walk so much in the summer as at other seasons.  To be sure we
make long journeys to the pitchers of icewater, and very long ones to the rivers and
ponds, and we travel a-field and toil and
sweat there the whole of the great yellow
summer days; but after all we don't see
much in the hot weather except ourselves,
we are so occupied in cooling and comforting our own flesh. Should our New England summer be twice as long as now, I
sometimes think we should not have any
great amount of industry, ingenuity and
sturdy virtue left us to brag of.  Situated as
we are, the fire which burns in us, now
impels our inventive intellect and carries us
through self-denying labors and over roundabout roads, to enjoyment; in hotter zones
our vital flame would only serve to keep the
passions at the boiling point.  Northern virtue taken to the tropics, might behave as curiously as the polar bears I see in cages, trying




136      -     FOOT NOTES.
to cool themselves with a moderate amount
of ice-water, and it might found some new
institutions. I know of a northern man who
once lived in one of the Southern States.
His sturdy virtue held out during all the
cooler months, and he persisted in being his
own servant; but in June he became willing
to be waited on, and he began to think that
a slave was a good thing to have in a hot
country.
I find people who don't like to think that
their virtues and intellect are nothing but the
natural products of the place they live in;
like apples, for example, which are produced
only in the temperate zone, or like the breadfruit which grows no where but in the tropics.
If we look at man as only a sort of higher
animal, it must be admitted that the facts are
a good deal in favor of those who would
make it appear that men are the creatures of
climate.  At present the best men are found
in the cool places. Nevertheless, Christianity
proposes to introduce a new element into the
question.  It was in warmer places than we
inhabit where men first received the gospel




SUMMER.                 137
and first struggled for a victory over the
flesh.  It may be that the tropics will yet
give the best fruits of the spirit and intellect.
A  man gets through the summer feeling
much like one who has gone over a rich
field, and gleaned too little.  He resolves in
future to be a more diligent observer.  Autumn, therefore, is like the temperate zone,
the most thoroughly explored spot in the
year.  I, too, am  inclined to multiply and
lengthen my walks, and 1 see a great many new
walkers abroad. Pedestrians coming from faroff nurseries, encounter me.  They  carry
books filled with pictures of all fruits; I look
at the fine show and feel guilty for having
doubted that the world will yet become a
paradise.  These men offer to comfort me
with apples; they offer me grapes of Eshcol;
they will sell me the vine that bears such a
grape "as grows by the beautiful river;" and
in short, they offer to fill my garden with all
the fruits of Eden.  These Mercuries, going
about on errands for Pomona, frequently
leave me




138;OO7 NOiTES.
A CATALOGUE FOR''IE FALL TRADE.
Crickets chirping in the grass,
Locusts z-inging in the trees,
Smell of apples on the breeze,
Begin the Autumn.
Clustered grapes o'erhanging rivers,
Gold-rods nodding in the pastures,
Poke-weeds flaunting out, and asters,
Make our Autumn.
Bursting barns o'er filled with sheaves,
Shorter days and wetter eves,
Crimson, yellow, scarlet leaves,
These in Autumn.
A growing coolness in the air,
A stillness reigning everywhere,
My book and lamp and easy chair,
These are Autumn.
Past and gone the summer's madness,
Pulsing, swelling, bounding gladness,
Mixed with pathos, sweetest sadness,
This is Autumn.
Denser brains and deeper hearts,
Stronger legs and quicker hands,
Higher prayers and wiser thoughts,
Come in Autumn.




XV.
F I do go among things to look at
O    them, it does not follow that I have
not believed in the reality of any
thing except matter. I like to look at things
a good deal; it is healthful for me.  Often
the first hint I get that all is not going well
with me, is that the trees and pastures and
my dinner, don't seem  quite right; they all
appear a little unreal. The things at which
I look so much, are, I conclude, only the
complement of things gaseous, airy, ghostly,
spiritual and invisible. It will be found that
these terms once meant just about the same
thing.  In order to have any profit from
walking, I find it necessary to look at the
universe as composed of a body and soul,
just as I think of myself as divided into
body and me. With a good, solid apprehension of God as the soul of all things, for a
vantage ground, a man can safely give a




I40             FO0 T NO TES.
large part of his attention to observation,
knowing all the while that he is dealing with
the less important things.  In fact, a man
without an abiding sense of God, can be
considerably troubled with unbelief in matter
itself, and he will be compelled to struggle
some to maintain a sense of its reality.  The
senses can't always make me absolutely certain
of outward things.
I strike my hand against the earth to prove
It real, and I only find it hard.
1 am at present a walker and looker, and
I like to go among things to see the universe
in all its variety and multiplicity, and feel the
mystery and unknowable which envelop me.
I am not always seeking after unities. Why
should a man be in a hurry to roll all things
together into a little pellet which he can eat
at one mouthful? The forest has yielded me
timber enough for my house; I shall, therefore, feel under no obligation to explore the
wilderness except at my leisure. The mysterious and the unknown are the thinker's
raw material: why should he be in haste to
work  up  the  whole of it at once?  It is




A SEER.               I41
enough for me to know  that all things are
bound together, even if I do not see all the
strings and knots that bind the package.
Still I want to make sure that I am well tied
in with the great bundle of things, and that
I shall not be lost out any where. But after
all, when my neighbor's hens ravage my
grapes, and when my party gets beaten- I
am a party man, and I am  always sure that
all the truth is on one side, and that is mine
— I want to go:up to some man and say,
"Be so kind, Sir, as to tell me in just two
words, what is the meaning of all this agglomeration of things which we call the
universe."
If I am a looker, I am something of a seer
too.  I find that I can not touch anything
without getting wider knowledges, and glimpses of more  comprehensive unities.  If I
employ myself in copying oak leaves, they
give me a hint which would, I am sure, if
well followed up, do much to reveal the
thought that underlies all things. I have seen
some of the unities, though I have demonstrated none of them. A man can go about




142            FOOT,NOTES.
and look at the earth in something ot the
same way in which a louse looks at the animal on which it is crawling. I have looked
at things as if each had a life of its own.
But some time ago nature revealed herself to
me, and 1 was made to look at things a
little more comprehensively. I will therefore
speak of the occurrence with some minuteness
of circumstance.
I was sitting near the edge of Paug Pond,
on a slope of broken stones which had tumbled down from the heights above. Pepperroot, adder's-tongue, and blood-root were
sprouting among the rocks about me. Flocks
of noisy grackles were flying around overhead.. At the foot of the slope sat a fisherman engaged in dressing his trout. I watched
him at his work. He held the fish in his left
hand, and with a single stroke of his.knife
he ripped up their silver bellies, then with a
quick thrust with his thumb he removed the
entrails, throwing them into the water with
a flirt. The pond was rippling with a movement more rhythmical and pleasing than that
which I generally find when reading prose or




A SEER.               I43
poetry. On the other edge of the pond was
the dark shore-line winding along under the
trees, and I saw the image of the overhanging hill reflected in the water.
Noting all these I was startled suddenly as
by a shock, and I saw that all things are
pervaded by a single life: in short, during
half a breath, I saw the earth as one living
creature. I was filled with awe. What I saw
I can never tell; it may have been like the
glimpse we get of a wild animal when he
darts into a thicket; it may have been like a
faint step, and a rustle of silk on the corridor;
or, it may have been like a white and jeweled
hand thrust from the window of a strange
house to draw  in the shutter.  I felt as if
nature had shown herself in order to rebuke
me for staring at her so grossly.  I was humiliated, I took to the road, feeling that I
must thereafter be more devout in the presence of nature than I had ever been.
If things are going well with a man,'he
may walk a good deal for the pleasure of it,
for profit enough will be sure to follow him.
Indeed, it is not easy to conceive of a man




144            FOOT NOTES.
walking. very much when the act is a drag
on him. But tramping about the country for
the mere pleasure of it, is perilous enough.
I have found that a man can't walk much
without coming face to face with the sternest
question of his life: "Will you walk only
when you are sent?" is the question.
1 have concluded that all my desires are
capable of being reduced to two: one is a
desire to have pleasure and be happy, the
other is a desire to find my place and do
what is wanted of me.  The first centers me
on myself: the second takes me out of myself and makes me refer to God for guidance.
The struggle between these two desires for
precedence, is what makes your life a battle.
People who have little or no desire except
for their own pleasure, are quite likely to
look on the great whole as arranged for giving them  enjoyment; but when they miss
happiness, they look on the universe as a failure, and are ready to jump into the sea.
We all started in life with the desire for
happiness altogether the most active and conspicuous. It is none of your business, says a




DUTY.                145
modern essayist, whether yvou: are happy or
not.  But it appears to me that these two
desires make a partnership, in which obedience  is the  controlling  member.   Christ
appears to have blended the two, for he says,
"My meat and drink" — my pleasure, -"is t.o
do the will of him who sent me."  When these
two desires are truly married, I imagine that
pleasing and being pleased will become a
more conspicuous part of life.  Till then a
man must needs ask for liberty to walk.
IO




XVI.
Y neighbor Ravenstone says I talk
too much.  I am  aware that I do
some talking just now, but then I
am a better listener than he is, at any time.
We are told that it. is more blessed to give
than to receive; but if you don't listen, how
can you ever bless a man by letting him
give his words to you? I therefore listen all
I can when I am walking about. One of
my critics tells me that I am always contenting myself with the lesser blessings.  I
know that I am a little backward, but I am
trying to familiarize myself with the idea
that the best of all things may be intended
for me too.  By listening attentively I can
generally hear something that is
ADDRESSED TO ME.
It is a February morning, and milky white
with a dense fog. I plunge into the sea of




ADDRESSED TO ME.            147
vapor and walk to a remote place to do some
pruning for the business man who gives me
work. The fog shuts out all sense of neighborhood, and I can see but little except the
peach-tree which I am pruning; so I stop
cutting off the red and yellow ishoots, and
seat myself on a cobble, to welcome the best
thing that may be coming to me.
The surrounding spaces seem like a vast
sea of sounds and voices; I therefore surrender myself to my ears.  Everything living
appears to be trying to assert its neighborhood
to me, and I am, if possible, more in society
in this solitary peach-orchard, than if I were
in a parlor.  From  the camps across the
valley comes a bugle-call, and the drummer's
steady "rub-a-dub, dub-a-dub, dub, dub."  In
one direction I hear the gobble of a turkey,
in another the gabble of geese, in a third I
hear the crowing of a cock; and then comes
the ringing sound of a hammer driving a nail
into a board. These domestic sounds, introduce to me the solitary men who dwell in
farm-houses surrounded by wife and children,
by horses and cattle, and sheep, and swine,




T48            FOOT NOTES.
by cats and dogs, and poultry. A blue-jay is
in the woods, and his scream sparkles out like
a musical scintillation. The note of a jay
brings much to me. He lives with us all the
year; but he has a habit of keeping long
silences. After you have forgotten him he
will come screaming about the orchards, or
he will show himself to you in some out-ofthe-way place, and bring you the whole year
- spring flowers, smell of pine and odor of
birch, golden-rods and scarlet leaves, snowflakes and summer heat. A nut-hatch is making his small measure of noise.  I like him,
for he is one of the birds that sing with their
backs to the audience, not caring for the
applause. The crows are cawing around me,
but they know perfectly well who is listening
to them. When one of these wary birds flies
nearer than usual and caws at me, he impresses me almost magnetically by his personality. He is full of his own self, if he does
belong to a flock.  And overflowing with
audacity, a hawk is screaming above the
trees.  He is piercing the silence with his
steely voice, like a robber searching with




ADDRESSED TO ME.           I49
dagger thrusts through curtains and tapestries.
In addition to all these unmistakable sounds
there was the noise of a "drop-press" in
some manufactory. The nearest shop in the
direction whence the sound appears to come,
is at Yalesville, two  miles distant.  This
sound was just the faintest amount of jar and
crash, and it could be distinguished only by
a special effort. Besides all the sounds which
I could hear distinctly, there seemed to be a
delicate wave or murmuring sound which
came from unknown sources, and harmonized
all the other sounds. The noise of the drophardly more than- the intimation of a sound
-appeared to be the boundary line between
the definite and the indefinite sounds. It had
something of the character of both; and it
served to prove the existence of a faint wave
of blended sounds rolling in from far-off concussions of the air.
All at once through this refined element of
sound which 1 was studying, and which filled
the air like a mist, there suddenly came the
screech and roar of the noon-express rushing
like a tornado and making an end of all my
fine hearing.




XVII.
N  order for a man to be a great
walker it is necessary, I sometimes
imagine, that he should be rather
homely.  Indeed, I know  that the  great
workers are a little uncomely: nature sacri-fices some of her best lines that she may put
a little more work into a man; she gives him
a bony wrist, a great hand and a large foot.
The people who tell me of the feats which
they have performed on foot, are not generally handsome men; they are of the same
sort as the hard workers. In my walks I see
a great many  fine-looking men, who  are
either riding or driving, or in one way and
another keeping company with horses. These
men have small hands and feet; nature consulted with beauty when she fashioned these
cavaliers. I sometimes stop to observe one
of these elegant figures, as he stands holding
the reins of his horse; I notice how his arm




DIR T.'5
tapers down to a plump strong wrist and
small hand, and I wonder how it is that these
easy-moving men will always ride; they
could add so much luster to a foot-path.
But then, I suppose they are too handsome
to' go afoot. Once in a while I see a genuine
horseman on foot; he generally appears a
little out of place, and looks as if he were in
search of a horse to make up for some- conscious deficiency in himself.  I have observed
the centaurs somewhat, and  I have found
that their hair is not always the finest, and
that their flesh is not the most ethereal.  In
fact, I don't think the finest grained men are
much given to horse fellowship.  Still, these
showy men, whose hearts go out in a perfect
gush towards their horses, do much to
enliven the roads, and I like to see them
driving their proud animals in the dusty
highways, while I tramp along the by-paths
to avoid the smell of harness-leather and
keep out of the
DIRT.
I once enlisted to serve in the great war
against filth.  For two years I fought dirt




152            FOOT NOTES.
and disorder; I not only struggled against
my own dirt, but I struggled with the dirt
of other people. I followed it into corners,
I drew it forth from  holes, I seized upon it
in open places, I burnt it, and I put it under
bonds to keep the peace. During those two
years I saw the universe under new aspects;
I found new categories for men and things.
All things are either dirt or not dirt. All
people are naturally divided into the following classes; First, those who take care of
their own dirt; second, those who do not
take care of their own dirt; third and last,
those who take care of other folks' dirt.
For present purposes, dirt may be defined
as chaotic and offensive matter-material in
a floating, intermediary state- matter which
is out of place and is antagonistic to other
things.  Dirt when gathered together and
held in subjection, ceases to be dirt; it then
has a right to exist.  It would take some
talk to make my neighbor Hokum think of
his compost-heaps as filth.  To him they are
good honest matter' undergoing some important chemical changes. He stands among his
heaps and talks of his labors.with all the




DIR T.                153
dignity of a chemist in his laboratory. I respect him, for he is a man governed  by
science rather than by sense.  Bouquets at
which beauty has sniffed, glossy curls which
have adorned the heads of fair women, skins
of radiant fruits, scraps of love-letters, bits
of paper. on which are printed poems, leaves
that have fluttered on the trees all summer,
and in brief, every good thing when separated
from its proper connections, becomes filth as
soon as it falls upon my lawn. Half angered
I seize upon the nuisance and bear it off to
where it will not offend.
All the powers seem to be calling for more
dirt; and they get it.  The snakes slough
their skins. Tidy people clip their hair and
pare their nails.  Wherever a man makes
anything, or uses anything, there he leaves a
heap of chips.  I have great trouble with
my brass door-plate, it has such a constant
liability to become dim with rust.  The girl
tells me it is getting much worn by her constant scourings. The Roman of to-day, we
are told, is walking in streets thirty feet
higher than those in which  Romulus first




154            FOOT NO TES.
traveled.  Rome has struggled to rise high
enough to sit upon her own pile of dirt.  I
notice the universal tendency of things to go
back towards dust.  The tooth of frost, the
claw of the lichen, the buff and rebuff of
wind and rain and hail and snow, at once
lay our fairest works under contribution to
swell the great aggregate of dirt.  Cheeks
which glow, eyes that seem celestial, forms
which walk in a halo of power and beauty,
must, unless some stay can be found, go to
supply the insatiable demand for more dirt.
Passing through an intermediate stage of
dirt, all matter seems to be in a perpetual
flux, first appearing in one form, then in another. The earth is like the mosses in a peatswamp; decay at one end and growth at the
other.  But I notice that men don't like to
give themselves up to this law of change.
He who can longest resist change and keep
his work or name from decay and dust, is
called greatest.  Resistance to the tendency
of everything to go to pieces, is one of the
things which makes my life, a perpetual fight.
I walk about among simple people, and I




DIK/Y:              155
see women bending over wash-tubs; I see
them stooping over pails to wring their
mops; indeed, I am everywhere reminded of
the great contest with dirt. This battle goes
on daily, hourly, instantly and always. Every
man and every woman is enlisted for the
war; even the vagabonds are not exempted;
in their shiftless fashion, they too are trying
to keep a little cleaner.  I am  much impressed by the vast army of people who are
exclusively engaged in this war: soap- and
brush-makers; the manufacturers of brooms,
and mops, and combs; barbers, scavengers,
gutter-men and sewer-makers, and washerwomen.  Where the dirty Mohawks once
lived, I see much land devoted to the raising
of broom-corn, and I conclude that the world
is really getting forward slowly. I find many
signs to make me believe that the war with
dirt is progressing favorably.  The Shakers
appear to have nearly annihilated their dirt;
I think, considering the notions they have
respecting some very pure things, their cleanliness is somewhat remarkable.
When I have walked in towns and seen the




156            FOOT NOTES.
neatness of the best streets, I have wondered
how it is that the millennium has not yet
come.  But when I go into the poor man's
quarter of the city, I imagine that the clean
spots of the earth are made by piling up the
dirt more thickly in other places.  I decided
some time ago that a broom and mop won't
make the millennium; however, I don't know
that they will be out of place even there.  I
have sometimes looked in at the door of
houses on back roads and seen the order of
some rustic woman; the sight of her neatness has affected me like a promise of better
things for this world.
I have seen people go into the battle
against dirt with a grim  earnestness  that
made their lives tragic. With such people
uncleanliness is unrighteousness; and a dirty
place is a hell. They are constantly troubled
with dirt in the eye. To them the fields and
woods are intolerable until scratched with a
rake and swept with a broom. It is best to
fight smilingly, and not be too earnest. Too
much earnestness is inconvenient, when it
puts one at loggerheads with the universe




DIRT.                 157
Dirt is a stream-an incident in the metamorphosis of matter; we can't destroy it,
but we can control it and get the good of it.
In order to maintain the practical value of
my writing, I will now give some directions
for conducting a campaign against dirt. The
struggle is at best, merely defensive. Dirt
attracts dirt; a single spot of it, if tolerated,
utters a rallying-cry to all manner of filth.
The first atom of invading rubbish should
therefore be attacked at once by broom or
rake and be carried off to the flames, or be
held in check where it will find most speedy
decay and re-birth into new forms of beauty.
Lovers, I notice, are haters of dirt. People
in love enter into the fight with new ardor:
they put on clean clothes.  More than one
literary man has made this circumstance the
occasion for a little pleasant thrusting at
lovers.  I have seen some very good people
who never made themselves entirely free from
the taint of dirt.  I have heard them  speak
as if they were in love, yet I thought they
were mistaken, for I did not see them striving
for greater personal purity.




158            FOOT NOTES.
When I have walked much in towns, and
mingled with men who are mostly concerned
with matter, my friends have sniffed at me
as if I were foul, and they would not be
content until they had given me a moral
scrubbing.  I meet men who are faultless in
respect to their linen; they are shaven and
shorn by artists; nevertheless, they are oozy
and dripping with a life that impresses me
like dirt.  Their words are like things fished
up from the gutter, and their thoughts smell
of putrefaction. Hot bath, cold bath, Turkish
bath, can not cleanse them.  Nothing but a
soaping with the most alkaline criticism, and
a moral rubbing, as with hempen towels, can
reach their dirt.




XVIII.
I-HE vagabonds all tell me that they
are  traveling  either to  Tlyre  or
Sidon.  Guided  by the  telegraph
poles these walkers hobble along the great
highways which connect the large towns.
They leave the filth of one city and make
painful pilgrimages to find the dirt of
another.
It is an easy thing to walk toward the
city: the roads all seem to lead in that direction.  I encounter many people  who  are
going to the towns to spend their leisure,
and they appear to think they are doing a
great thing.  If I inquire my way to the
pond, or to the sea, or to place-no-place,
men give little starts of surprise, as if I were
out of the regular lines of travel in more
ways than one, and they are not satisfied
until they have subjected me to the inquisi



i6o            FOOT NOTES.
tion.  The city itself is swelling with the
idea that it is more worthy than the country.
When I walk in the town I see men sitting'in the public places, and holding stumps of
cigars in their mouths.  They look at me as
if they thought the city had in some way
conferred royalty upon them.  But I know
that the dirt of the street is in their eyes,
and that the fume of the gutter has reached
their heads.
I think I understand what the cities are
good for.  They keep the surplus of sugar
and shoes and cloth, until we country people
want more of those articles.  When  my
grape-vines yield more fruit than I can use,
the city stands ready to find some one to eat
the rest for me.  The towns always serve as
landmarks to guide a man when he is walking on the unfamiliar roads which lead
through meadows and bush pastures. I myself know something about the fascination of
the town. When I have approached the city I
have felt its delirium stealing into my brain,
and I have been invited to gobble pleasure
as greedily as a pig feeding on sour milk. 1




THE C T Y.             16
have witnessed the brilliancy of the city, and
I have listened to the music made by the
voices of its great industries. I have sat upon the deck of a wood sloop and heard the
sounds that came from the docks: the rattling
of the trucks trundling freight on board a
steamer; the creaking of the pulleys when a
sail is hoisted; the noise of the stevedores
unloading the coalers; the slamming of boards
in a lumber-yard; the quick rattle of a sail
as it slides down the mast.
Having looked into matters, I have concluded that a man hoeing turnips in the
country, is the person who works amid the
splendors. He is the man whom all should
go to see if they wish to'find' one who has
the most superb surroundings. I am now
picking my grapes; my cow is feeding down
in the old pasture where the mint and sweetfern grow, where the oak is dropping its
acorns, and where the  chestnut-trees are
scattering their burrs. A maple has cast a
red reflection in the pond where the lilies
grow. If I will but step aside I can see the
great show of golden-rods in my neighbor's
II




T62            FOO7T NOTES.
pasture. Near the gate, by the road, is my
poke-weed; it has done well this year, and
its purple stalks now support long racemes
of pink, and white, and green flowers, and
dark purple berries. It is a regal herb. I am
surrounded by splendor to-day and have no
need of going to the city to look after the
glitter of frescoes, plate-glass and facades.
The roads all lead to the city; so it is not
strange that the vagabonds and people without a purpose, should yield to the tide which
sets toward the town. But I don't think it is
good to go the same way with the tramps;
a man had better go the other way and walk
in the
BACK NEIGHBORHOODS.
On the tops of the hills between the great
thoroughfares, and a little aside from the
main wagon roads, where railways and telegraph lines will never go, I sometimes find.
neighborhoods which may be called the lean
spots of Connecticut.  These are  not the
gathering places of enterprise.  Enterprise in
this State, like the soil, has a decided tendency




BA CA NEIGHBORHOODS.        163
to work down into the valleys. Life don't
gather in these back places; it radiates from
them and goes to swell the life of those rapidgrowing towns about which we like to
brag when in the hearing of Englishmen.
Men live in these out of the way corners, but
go elsewhere to get work. These are the
spots where men and women are the staple
productions.  I have known of the world
sending to one of these corners to get a
brain-worker.
The roads in these back neighborhoods are
like striped ribbons -three stripes of earth
and two of grass  and they go winding along
between the, stone walls, and under the outstretched arms of wayside oaks, and among
red.cedars that once in the year are all ablaze
with the scarlet leaves of the Virginia-creeper.
These roads have been made by the man who
drives a sober horse harnessed to a plain
wagon, and who jolts along to church
with his wife, or to the mill with a bag of
corn. With the exception of the people who
live on them, these roads are not much
traveled except by the men who go into by



i64            FOOT NOTES.
places to find hired girls, and purchase young
cattle, and by myself who go.there to get
some of the things which otherwise might run
to waste.
Connecticut is so full of ingenuity and invention, I am constrained to walk in the back
neighborhoods to see some of its quaint old
industries.  Within hearing of the cars, I
sometimes find the hand-loom and the old
spinning-wheels.  I see wooden-toothed harrows tilted up against the walls.  I notice
men pursuing some rather primitive modes
to fill their small barns. ~ Leaving out of account the main staples -the men and women
-these small barns hint at light crops. However, there is always another harvest of
whortleberries, blackberries, chestnuts.and
hickory-nuts and poetry. The crop of poetry
which I find in the old fields is not small.
But I don't think much of it is ever harvested.
The most of it is either plowed in or suffered
to rot down like rowen. I sometimes harvest
a little of it for my own convenience. Indeed,
it would be well for every man to gather
some of it, but then I would not have him




BACK NEIGHBORHOODS.         i65
think he must rush into market with it.
When I try to talk with men I sometimes
notice that they are a little deaf; I infer from
this that nine-tenths of the good things
which I get, are given me expressly for my
own consumption. So when I say crop of
poetry, I don't mean verse; verse is what we
get when the purple cluster is mashed and
its juice is sealed up in regular measures with
great dimples in their bottoms. Taken all
together, the crop in these retired places is
somewhat immense I think.
I like to walk among the people in back
places, where. the folks wear their clothes to
keep themselves warm, and not to make a
show on the street. These people have none
of the town's polite insolence; they look at
me with a sort of brotherhood in their eyes.
But I do not go among men to praise them
all. I have seen the weight of depravity
which everywhere weighs down upon man;
and I should be a poor reporter, indeed, if I
did not tell once for all how well I know
that every man stands in need of divine help.
I see men on our country roads, who have




x66            FOOT NO TES.
been much abroad; they are covered with
moral travel-stains and they have the hard
finish which men get in the great towns.
When I contrast these men with our simple
farmers, I am ready to shell the city with
hard words.
I also observe a great many deep-chested
women in the back places. To-day I saw a
bare-headed and bare-armed woman engaged
in feeding and counting her turkeys; with
one red arm she held her feeding-dish against
her stout waist, and with the other she pointed
out the fowls as she counted. The sight of
that woman re-assured me that the vigor of
the race is not much impaired.
These back neighborhoods are good places;
for in them you have a chance to escape from
the tyranny of society, which compels a man.
to wear a gold ring on his little finger and
put a carpet on his floor, and which makes
him feel a little ashamed if he can't live like
my neighbor Dives. I am engaged just now in
scrutinizing the sumptuary requirements of
society. I have helped take up a carpet or
two, and it has occurred to me that they were




BACK NEIGHBORHOODS.         I67
put. down to conceal the fact that I have
been living on a mass of filth and barbarism,
which my neighbor Hokum would not tolerate
an instant on his barn floor. However, I find
myself somewhat emancipated from ordinary
society; were it otherwise, I would go to
some by-place where I could draw  nigh to
God and nourish myself on the fatness of an
old pasture.




XIX.
F a man takes to the road to look
after the golden-rods, not knowing
nor caring much where he shall go,
he will be pretty sure to miss the profit of
his expedition. My walks are definite jobs
and I know when I have finished one of
them. If you aim at some particular spot in
the spaces around you, it will keep you from
making too much leeway. It exasperates me
to hear people talk about rambling; the word
is unsavory. Let weak-minded persons ramble, and maunder as they go. Some folks are
much given to lounging at home because they
can't see any big thing towards which to
travel.  After a somewhat careful measurement, I have concluded that the small things
are the greatest.  I have fed on sublimity
ever since I made that discovery. If I take
a long tramp to get the acorns of the pin-oak,




WHERE TO GO.             I69
I not only find the nuts, but I get something
else besides.  Nature invites us to a little
lunch, but she seats us at a table which glitters
with crystal and which is warm with ruby
wines.
Country villages are conspicuous things, and
in the lack of anything better, they will serve
to set bounds to a jaunt on foot. A town
always offers something to an observer. The
people of a village often have a succulence and
showiness which surpasses what I see among
country folk, just as the asters and salvias
in my garden outflaunt the fringed gentians
and wild-asters. The crop of men in a village
is somewhat large; and I go there when I
want to see a plenty of people.  I raise
spinach in order to be sure of having an
abundance of greens in the spring; but when
I want something flavorous and tonic 1 go
into the swamp to get cowslips and scurvygrass, or into the fields to get dandelions.
I always know when I reach the seat of
government in one of our little Connecticut
democracies, for I there find the whippingpost. These posts are very convenient pieces




170            FOOT NOTES.
of timber about which to loop the outer end
of a walk. I see them standing out alone
upon the village green where the cows
pasture; I see them standing under the pendant limbs of old elms whose trunks are
yellow with lichens; I have seen them keeping company with the liberty-pole, town-pump
and stone horse-block. Some of these posts
have been made by skillful carpenters, for they
are fashioned like columns, and they hint at
pedestal, shaft and capital. Their broadest
sides are garnished with notices from townofficials, and they are well sprinkled with
nail-heads and nail-holes. Small sinners are
no longer scourged at the whipping-posts;
but, nevertheless,  these  sturdy  sticks of
painted wood are the most pungent reminders
of Puritan rigor, which I ever notice in
AN OLD TOWN.
A cleanly old colonial village full of white
houses; it stands on a lap of land near the
sea; on the one side are salt-water meadows
veined with coves through which the tides
creep backward and forward; on the other




AN OLD TO WeN.           I71
side meadows and hill-pastures, now - green
with alders, scarlet with sumac, blood-red with
dog-wood, yellow and brown with hickories.
The regicides, Goffe and Whalley, once
skulked there; but I shall not tell its name,
for I have not been hired to raise the price
of its building-lots. The people are mostly
farmers, and they "have retained, more than
most others in the State, the ancient manners
of the New  England colonists."  "The first
planters, whether Gentlemen or Yeomen, were
almost all of them husbandmen by profession,"
and they came from  Kent.   Manufactures
have never thriven either in township or village; nevertheless, the old town has grown
rich upon the fruits of the soil, and by the
small industries which are immediately connected with agriculture; and it has many
large and comfortable houses. There were
"but few traders" among the first settlers;
" not one blacksmith; it was with great cost
the town obtained one to live among them.
In this respect they were quite different from
the first settlers of New Haven, although they
came with them. The good people who came




I72            FOOT NOTES.
with Mr. Davenport were Londoners bred to
merchandise, and fixed upon a place proper
for trading, which was their design."
A traveler reaching this old town at nightfall, must go around in the twilight and seek
entertainment in some one of the two hundred
houses, for the place has not had a hotel for
some years past. A few small and unobtrusive stores are mingled with the substantial
houses which look out upon the large and
neatly-fenced public square, where stand the
maples and elms, town-pump and liberty-pole.
The place is not without sprightly modern
houses, standing on clean lawns, embellished
with altheas and box and separated from the
street by iron fences; but these natty dwellings are every where flanked and fronted by
well-kept old houses that have quince-trees,
currant-bushes and lilacs, for accessories.
The ancient houses of this old-fashioned
town deserve careful mention for they are
such as are peculiar to Connecticut, and they
are the signs of the substantial comfort and
prosperity which preceded the wealth that
has flowed in from manufactures.  The West




AN OLD TO WN.             73
has built no characteristic mansions; men
there go at once froin the log-cabin or cheap
board structures, into Italian or Gothic villas
and cottages; but New England, before its
Puritanism became diluted and before it commenced borrowing ideas in architecture, had
time to build some houses which flavor a
walker's experience like old cheese.  The
houses in this town are large, solid, two
story in front and one in the rear. The second story projects beyond the lower one,
and the garret beetles over the second.
Many of these houses have only five windows in front; some are varied by gambrel
roofs and by wings which give an additional
piquancy.  The huge broad-throated stone
chimneys seem as if intended to give stability
to the wooden structures built around them.
An old smoke-stack has known many inhabitants; at the bottom of it successive families
of men, women and children, who have
hovered around the fire-places, loving, hoping,
cooking, fearing, praying, and gnawed with
care; at the top, annual broods of swallows
that have thundered and twittered there, and




174            FOOT NVOTES.
gyrated above it, and lived without care.
These plain houses, built by men severely
practical and unaffected, have in the end
come to possess a quaint beauty like that
which one gets in old-time prose.  Thus in
the long run, simple truth is sure to transmute
itself into beauty.  The modest ornaments of
these houses —a bead on the great oak beam
over the kitchen, and a chimney-top laid up
with reentrant angles, show what an inexpugnable love of display existed even in the
soul of a Puritan.
There are many old men in this town; some
at work in their back-yards; others going
with baskets on their arms to the store or
meat-shops. They are slight-made men, and
they have that gentility which I do not remember of seeing anywhere except in New
England. Our Puritan stock, depleted by the
emigrations to the West, and uncrossed with
the coarse vigor of the European immigrants,
evidently has some tendency towards physical
enfeeblement. Winthrop and Hawthorne probably did not have to go out of their native
states to get the originals of " Hugh Clitheroe"




AN OLD TOWN.             I75
and "Clifford Pyncheon."  Elderly men tired
of their farms, gather into this old town;
when young, they could keep themselves
warm in isolation, but now they huddle
together to get a little social warmth, or to
find a more ready consolation from the public
offices of their religion.
In an old house which stands upon the
mIost public corner of the green, there lives
an aged and childless poet, who has crept
back to his native town, from the metropolis
where he found fame and friends. Years ago
he sung "with voice as trumpet loud," but
now he haunts the most frequented places in
the village, as if he could not quite get over
the habit of going where men live in throngs.
I shall not name him. You who like to read
poems bound in blue and gold, need not ask
to see the poet; you saw him while you read
his lines. If you are ever curious to see the
man who writes verse, you may find that he
mumbles to himself in the street; that he
has a trivial round of outward activity; that
he tries to warm his heart with that drink
which men flavor with water and juniper



176            FO0T NO TES.
berries. If 1 have pared the peach and given
you the pulp, don't come asking where I
threw the rind, or where I have planted the
stone.




XX.
- -    T  one time I was curious to know
how the trees feel and  of what the
dumb creatures are thinking.  Some
of my discoveries were surprising to myself
-even startling, and from which I was fain
to draw  back, though they were  exceedingly
vague in outline and  intangible.  I will only
stop here to say that I once got at
THE VIEWS OF A WOODCHUCK.
I deem it very good luck,
That I'm only a woodchuck,
For I never have to travel,
All the world over
On stony roads and gravel,
To get my beans and clover.
I've no friends with axes
To grind,
Nor a king with taxes
To bind.
12




I78              FOOT NOTES.
I keep no crusts upon a shelf;
For in the winter I can nurse myself.
I shut my doors
To stop the bores
And sleep the while
To save my stores.
As for my evil'Tis but the wheat and the weevil.
Guns, traps, and gins,
May greatly vex me;
And other sins
May all perplex me;
But I'll not care the chirp o' the sparrow
Which dips, and darts like an arrow
O'er banks of cinque-foil and yarrow.
When I'm done with my bones,
I'll give them to the stones,
That have made me a home
And go to brighter zones..
I deem it very good luck
That I'm only a wvoodchuck.
The rocks and trees are always ready to
be looked at: the reaction from them is
pleasant, and they never come into antagonism with you except by their passive resistance  which  compels  you  to  walk  around




WOODCHUCK-HUNTERS.  79
them.  But when I try to look after the
quails, I find that they, too, are observers:
they glance at me and then with a loud
/whir-r-r they fly over the fence one after
another, and skimming along the ground they
alight in some field of stubble.  If I ride
with Mr. Hokum, these birds treat me as if
I were half horse, keeping very still until I
can note their colors and feel their wild
beauty.  I am in no haste now  to smother
my sense of their grace, with the coarse
feeling  of a sportsman.  But when I go
among men, I see in their eyes such means
of defense and such power of attack, it is
hard for me to tell which of us is the sportsman and which the game.  I often feel as if
I were the one that is bagged.
1 was one day walking on that edge of
Wallingford plain which is nearest the Quinnipiac.  I had in view some yellow oaks, a
rail-fence, and a small hollow,,brown  and
red  with  whortleberry  bushes, blackberry
briars, and the creeping dewberry. Two colored men, carrying spades and woodchucks,
and accompanied by their dogs, presently




T80           FOOT rNOTES.
entered on the scene.  The dogs coursed
about, sniffing at all the holes, the men
waded among the briars and waited, and I
looked on with that remoteness of feeling
which makes no distinction between man and
nature. The dogs soon giving promise of
game, the men went to work.  I wanted to
know how woodchucks were captured, so I
joined the hunters. We briefly dropped our
chins towards our breasts in token of reverence for one another. I admire horses, I pat
dogs on the head; but if I come close
enough to a strange man, I have an impulse
to give him all the worship there is in a
nod. The dogs ran around in quest of more
game; the black man standing, perhaps,
nearest the animals, followed up the hint
given by the hounds, and conducted operations, while the mulatto did the digging.  I
asked questions about woodchucks' holes, the
digger sought news from the great world,
and the other man kept at work, sending his
breath through his broad nostrils in short
puffs like a snort. But we were all embarrassed, and one of us felt better when we




LIBER TY.              I8 
were further apart; but for all that, I now
feel somewhat nearer those men.
Walking among men is not quite as pleasant as tramping in the fields.  I am not a
bashful man —that is easy to be seen; but
when I get among strange folks I feel as if I
had carried my wares to the wrong market.
I parade my ideas and they seem to me like
the pale-yellow leaves which fall off before
autumn; they appear like small wild-flowers
which were pressed and dried last year. But
a man's thoughts always have value in some
market. My opinions have great weight out
in my garden: the grape-vines are almost
wholly governed by my views. People often
look" over my garden fence to ask me how
I do' things, and they listen to me almost as
much as they talk to me. Once in a while I
go down to the post-office; if neither the'squire, nor the colonel, nor neighbor Dives,
is there, I then give my views at large upon
any subject that is uppermost. Some of them
have been reported to the'squire, and he has,
I understand, undertaken to refute them.
I see men whose walk is a sort of creeping




;:182         FOO T NO TES.
when they go  abroad, they are so much
cramped by the upper classes of society. The
number of persons I meet who make a distinction between themselves and the people is
somewhat noteworthy. I have concluded that
our Christian, Puritan New England is just
about the most aristocratic part of the
country.  The South  has stood upon its
negroes and its valor, while we have stood
upon our spelling-books and ingenuity: but
the South will have to get a dictionary now,
for New England has added courage to its
virtues. 1 once knew a Yankee teacher -who
went into one of the Carolinas and who
thought that if the whites were worthy to be
served by the blacks, he was worthy to be
served by the master's folks. A young man
came into my garden once to learn how  I
train my grape-vines. He was pale and narrow-chested, and he had a weak jaw, a downy
chin, and a troubled eye. I patronized him,
for I was in my own garden. By and by he
said to me feebly, "Don't you think the'Concord' is the grape for the people?" " I
think it is," I replied; yet I said to myself,




LIBER TY.              83
"our high schools and our picture  galleries
are making havoc with the Christian simplicity of our young people." I have often
heard men emphasize people in that way, but
it is not a good. thing to do in the hearing
of a man who is obliged to work for a living.
But perhaps the young man thought that the
word people comprises all the persons who
don't see the difference between'my "'Delaware" grapes and such as grow along the
river; and mayhap he did. feel himself somewhat separated from the men and women
who have strong muscles and square jaws,
and who can work-hard and do much hearty
eating.
I sometimes feel a good deal cramped when
I walk arong the men who belong to what
are called the lower classes. Educated people
don't look at my knapsack and inquire if I
am  a peddler of essences.  Very ordinary
folks sometimes corner me up and retail their
opinions just as if I could not appreciate anything better. After such encounters a man
feels obliged to go into the fields and pick
up a new impression before he can recover
his self-respect. My liberty is always cur



i84            FOO   NOTES.
tailed by the bondage of common people.
Mr. Hokum's man, Krusty, works very hard
because he is obliged to get a living; he has
raised a family for some reason which he does
not quite understand; and on  Sunday he
puts on a kind of severe virtue and marches
off to church with his wife and two boys,
because he thinks that is doing the best thing.for himself and the right thing by the Lord.
Now, I don't do anything as he does; but
whenever he finds me walking on Mr.. Hokum's farm, he has a way of making me feel
that I am a shiftless man, because I don't
stay at home and perpetually weed my onionbed. Why should not I walk in the pastures
sometimes, instead of looking after a job as
soon as I have done the work in my garden?
I have not come into a life-long bondage to
labor, as Krusty has in consequence of getting married.
I often feel belittled by the superiority of
lumber-men, teamsters and sailors.  I have
stood upon the deck of a sloop in the night
and seen the captain standing like a phantom
at the helm, shouting his orders to his men
amid the flapping of sails, the, dashing of the




LIBERTY                185
waves, and the uproar of the jib-tackle as it
thrashed along the "traveler;" and I have
then seen garden-craft, pen-craft, and such
men and arts as thrive in parlors, dwindle
when contrasted with the rugged faculty of
the sailor. At such times I have been glad
to sit in company with the captain at his
little dancing table, and eat boiled pork and
cabbage and drink coffee without milk; for
I hoped I was reinforcing my stock of hardy
manhood.
I am not going to make a special plea in
favor of isolation, for I notice a very strong
native tendency in men to seek some sort of
reinforcement from one another. But society
just now  is something of an illusion; and
meii, I judge, are generally'a little disappointed in each other.. I see them  shaking
hands and going through with all the routine
of hospitality and politeness, and I wonder
how it is that they do not blush or burst
out laughing in each other's faces at the
farce they are enacting —so little of value
passes between them, and they are so weary
of one another, and so glad to be parted.
We all find it easier to enact our ideals than




iZ86           FOOT NO TES.
to live them. At present, any- swamp affords
a more wholesome refreshment than one gets'from a crowd of men. I was once overtaken
by a stranger who invited me to ride with
him.  I knew he was going to ask me, for I
felt my back spattered with his kind intention.before it came forth in words.  A.man who
walks in a town is spattered by all sorts of
folks.  The sensual man, the sinful man, and
the despairing man, all splash you with their
grossness, their sin, and their despair.  Nevertheless, the demand for friendship is constant.  I have- seen sharp men engaged at a
bargain; both were intent on making. a good
thing of it, and yet they spoke in the language of courtesy, with much by-play of
words, as if fellowship rather than trade were
their main business.  But I don't see how
there can be much refreshment of man by
man, until the love of God comes into the
hearts of men.  When the church shall become a living body, then society will be a fit
place for men to reinforce one another; until
then, people will either slink away, or resort
to shams to conceal the poverty and hunger
of -their hearts




XXI.
Y scientific friend says he likes to
walk on the farm  of a man who
tills his land for the love of it. Putting one's heart into his work is a good
thing; I like to see a man do it.  I have
seen wonderful success follow the men who
have been content to work for love, and who
have taken their pay in hope.  I often come
across bankers, merchants and manufacturers,
who are rich enough to keep a farm  for a
play-ground, and I then think it is worth
while to have money since it enables a man
to make play of his work.  These men paint
their barns, they make their fences one board
higher than do their neighbors, and they put
more stones into their walls; they draw
many loads of muck into their yards, and
they put much manure upon their fields;
*they plow deep, and raise longer ears of
corn than other people., The close-fisted man




I88            EQOT NO TES.
who employs me, says he "shouldn't like to
eat their hasty pudding, it would taste so
strong. of money, though the corn was raised
for the love of it."  These men's farms are
pleasant walking-places; I see much corn
and buckwheat there, and many turnips; - red
clover and herd's grass have the entire sway
in the meadows, occupying all the ground to
the very foot of the fences; there are no
burdocks in the cow's tails, and no "devil's
pitch-forks" to stick in one's trowsers. However, for every-day walking, these fine farms
don't wear like a place where the weeds and
bushes have a chance to hold up their heads.
A man does n't have to go far to find
people who work for the love of it.  The
number of men who have leaned on my ga-rden fence and given me advice, is not small.
When the governor visited our town, he is
said to have looked over toward my land
and to have suggested grapes for my clay
bank.  I have concluded that the business of
giving advice is pretty much overdone, the
number of people engaged in it is so amazing.
It makes me hot to, see how  ready some




WORKING FOR LO VE.        189
folks are to guide you, not much matter
where, they have so great a love for the
work.  I have seen miserable little skippers
who sailed from Podunk, and who wrecked
themselves in the fog on Goose Island; and
after all that they will come around and
offer to pilot your ship to the Cape of Good
Hope.  The demand for advice is, I notice,
somewhat limited, and when men want it they
prefer to buy it. The world at present seems
like a crowd of deaf men engaged in shouting
counsel to one another, while goblins stand
about rubbing their hands in high glee over
the spectacle. Nevertheless, I imagine that a
candid review of our lives would reveal the
fact that our best and happiest acts have
been those we did when humble enough to
accept advice or criticism.
I find a good many New England farmers
who, I am sure, work for the love of it. A
piece of poor land has a wonderful fascination
for these men;  they can not be easy until
they have made it yield a good crop in spite
of its poverty.  Wherever I go, the soil assails me with agricultural problems which




190            FOOT NO TES.
challenge' solution.  I don't carry the eyes'of
a farmer with me when I visit Wallingford
plain, but for all that, it always beguiles me
into studying how-its barren sand can be
made to yield. bread or timber. I sometimes
observe an Irishman's garden on the plain or
in some hollow scooped out at the foot of
the mountain; I imagine that the little spot
is mine, and I at once project some' improvements just for the love of it; for th&se poor
patches don't often get much enrichment
beyond what comes from the home feelings
and from a small amount of hope plowed in
at planting time. Mr. Hokum takes an agricultural paper, and he wants to improve
every piece of land he sees. Some one saying to him that there was no depth of soil
in the swamp which he was draining, he said,
"I don't care if there isn't- I can make a
soil!"
The soil of New  England is her greatest
educational institution.  Yale  College  and
Harvard are doing something in the way of
science and literature, but for thorough schooling they don't begin to compare with -the old




DR Y SA W-MfILLS.        19 I
meadows and pastures which have nursed
successive crops of Yankees for two hundred
years. Our farmers grapple zealously with
the tough problems of the soil, and they
gather a few potatoes into their cellars, a
little corn into their granaries, and some hay
into their barns; but in the meantime they
have been putting ingenuity and perseverance
and energy into their very blood and. fiber.
A Yankee doesn't go West or South to
enlarge his ideas, he goes -there to find room
for them. When I have called at the farmhouses among the whortleberry-pastures, the
old people have told me of their sons who
had gone abroad to act in the professions or
in wider spheres of business, and I have been
much' impressed by the amount of latent talent
there is in the New England farmers.
But the most noteworthy people who work
for the love of it, are the men who build
ID)RY SAW-MILLS.
When 1 go across lots, my path is sometimes intercepted by a dike and a ditch which
go creeping this way and that, along the base




192            FOOT NOTES.
of a hill. At one end of the dike is a brook
scarcely larger than a ribbon; at the other
end there is the foundation of a mill, or an
old water-wheel tilted over by the decay of
its supports, and  rotting amid grass and
weeds.  At other times the highway cuts
through an earthen dam; I certainly know it
is a dam, for it is built across a little hollow
where I can see a pebbly channel in which
water once ran.  Bunches of willows and
alders have sprung up at the foot of the embankment; its sides are green with grass,
while the end next the road is kept naked by
the cattle which go there to hook in the dirt.
One's imagination kindles at the thought of
these folk who have water on the brain - for
none others would think of building a mill in
places so dry - and you feel a sort of yearning toward the simple man whose heart was
kindled up by an enthusiasm for water-wheels.
But Connecticut is not the only State in
which you can see mechanical genius going to
waste in out-of-the-way pastures. These dry
mills can be found in places where the long
gray streamers of Spanish moss hang from




DRY SA W-MILLS.          I193
the branches of southern cypress trees.  I
have seen these mills standing on northern
rivulets, and they were shaded by white pines
whose moanings cause sensitive people to
slink away as we do from the men and women
who have let loss and wrong turn them into
cynics and darklings.
With the men who have a passion for mills,
the mere sight of water seems to be enough
to set all their wheels a-turning. When a
man has something- in his eye, it is hard for
him to see things just as they are. If one of'
these men has a little brook which comes
tumbling down through his pasture, making
eddies for the fish where it takes a turn
against a big rock, or one that -wanders
through a meadow between banks tufted with
spotted alders and red dog-wood, he will find
means to build a mill and make a dam to
stop the trout, and to flow a pond which disappoints the  frogs by  drying up  in the
summer.
A man who has been studying flowers to
discover the evidences of design, may find his.
interest flagging; but let him find a dry sawI 3




I94             FOOT NO TES.
mill, and he will take a new start. I always
stop  to look at these mills.  I often  feel
great admiration for their ingenious contrivances; everything is all ready for business;
brains have done their work, and nothing is
wanting except water, and that, I suppose
the  proprietor carries in  his head.  The
brains of mill-owners don't stop going, even
if their water-wheels do refuse to revolve;
so a little grist-mill is added to the saw-mill,
and then, perhaps, a cider-mill.
The men who build these mills are ambitious men-they like power, that is, they love
a water-power. They delight in playing with
power, and in making it dart around among
their water-wheels, cog-wheels and levers. I
see a great many boys playing with waterwheels and making miniature dams in roadside ditches. We have all played in that
way. After awhile we quit that and go off
to work for the newspapers, or to till a
farm, or to build mills on the Quinnipiacs
and Merrimacs; but these men stick to their
play, and fill the blood of their families with
mechanical talent. I am not going to dispar



DRY SA HW-MILLS.          i95
age the tinkers, for I see' that mechanical
genius is just now taking all the great prizes.
When flanked and supported  by  chance
groups  of old  chestnuts and  by  thickets
intensified by an admixture of hemlocks, a
little old mill with its steep roof of black and
mossy slabs, and with its rudely roofed ciderpresses, sometimes gives one a taste of the
picturesque, which makes him a little ashamed
of our conscious attempts at ornamentation,
and which, for a moment, makes him believe
there is a power waiting to convert all our
works into beauty, if we will only work
reverently and simply like children.
The mill which I have in mind to-day,
stands where two long, wooded banks converge like the waist of an hour-glass. In the
winter time, the pond above yields a great
harvest of ice: in the summer and fall-it produces a crop of sickle-grass, smart-weed,
downy-topped wild-grass and cat-tails.  Below  the mill is a ravine worn into the red
sand-stone and crossed by a bridge, looking
under which one sees a pool of water, gray
tree-trunks and a misty shadow. In the bot



96             F0ooT NOTES.
tom of the crooked ravine are slimy stones,
willows, alders, and bits of boards strayed from
the mill.  Chestnuts, yellow, red and white
oaks, two or three birches and hemlocks,
all cling to the upper edges of the rocks and
stretch their limbs across the chasm. Witchhazels cluster at the foot of the trees; partridge-berries, and ferns which keep green
all winter under the snow, nestle among the
shrubs, and broad lichens creep down the
sloping rocks; thimble-berries hang their
long, mealy branches over the face of the
red stone.  Under the mill is the blackened
water-wheel and a smell of rotten wood, and
a few leaves and sticks entangled in the
wooded grating which bars the entrance to
the flume. In the upper part of the building,
where work should be done, is the carriage;
and on it are the two great mill-bars and
the dogs with iron teeth to hold down a
log.  There are. dead stalks of mullein and
scabish in the lumber-yard, and four or five
stocks of weather-beaten chestnut boards,
carefully piled upon blocks, a stick having
been put between every two pieces of lum



DRY SA W-MILLS.            197
ber. On the other side of the mill is the
log-yard.  In it are some chestnut logs with
yellow ends; a few knotty. sticks of white
oak which show a union of season-cracks and
concentric layers, that looks like a spider's
web; and some old timbers, the bark of
which has rotted away from the top and
slipped down the sides in long strips, to
show how the worms have done their work.
In the winter, hopeful men bring their logs
to these dry saw-mills.  Ox-teamsters may
be seen there, walking at the shoulders of
their near-oxen, or riding on their sleds and
holding on to the great rough-hewn stakes
by a hand and one knee, while they flourish
a long whip-stalk with a very short lash. In
the spring-time, when the snow is melting and
little  twisted  rills are running  down  the
slopes, the ponds fill with water, and then
the sleepy old mills wake up for a time;
they have waited long, but their inspiration
has come at last.  The waters make a noisy
rush at the mill-wheel, the saw is working
with hurried energy, and there is a smell of
saw-dust and fresh-cut lumber.  The passer



I98             FOOT NOTES.
by hears the loud cizuck, cztuck made by the
heavy mill-bar as it drives the dogs into the
ends of the log; and the sawyer filing his
saw, makes music for those who stand far-off
and listen in the morning air.




XXII.
F Washington Irving had staid at
home and walked in Connecticut he
would have found themes enough to
inspire his tearful genius without going to
visit Westminster Abbey or English churchyards. A man who likes to go mousing about
in quest of painful things, will find a plenty
of occasions when handkerchiefs are more
needful than an umbrella to insure dry walking. But I am  not going to add to the
literature which is inspired with that poor
sentimentality  which  people  cultivate  at
funerals and in graveyards. Enough of that
sort of writing has been done already. When
I read the pages of some master of pathos, I
am often tempted to fling his book aside in
order to escape from the old gnome. There
is no lack of people who will let you join
them in the grisly entertainment which they
get from contemplating the strange growths




200            FOOT NOTES.
that spring up around the grave. I was once
cornered up where I was obliged to listen to
some women who discoursed'of disease, and
doctors, and drugs, and death, until I hardly
dared to turn about to look, for fear I should
see a pair of ghouls instead of two practical
Yankee women capable of going through
wifehood or widowhood.
I can not walk anywhere without feeling the
gloom which invests many of the outward
signs of popular religion. The meetinghouses where men are' exhorted to well-doing
because they must die, often have a nearness
to the graveyard  which suggests the idea
that death is the main pillar of the church.
The bells ring out their loud knells, which go
circling wider and wideri until they reach the
farmers in far-off-meadows, and the choppers
in the woods; but these loud-mouthed callers
to the town are silent when children are
born, when lovers join hands, and when some
man has found a shining truth.
A little old Puritan burying-ground in some
back pasture, where the first settlers of the
town were laid, has a pathetic interest for




MA AKING MOAN.           20I
him who stops to note the broken tomb-tables
and the broad lichens which envelope the
angles of the headstones, or to decipher the.
grotesque carving and the faint records of
young men and maids who vanished from life
at its very portal.  The solid  farm-house
which has been abandoned to alien broods
who swarm around its blackened and greasy
door-ways and who break down the lilacs
and destroy the domestic herbs, tansy, catnip,
fennel, horse-radish and comfrey, has a sort
of pathos, and so have the vagabond women
whom I see sitting on the sunny side of
banks, to keep out of the wind while they do
a day's work of patching-two great bundles
of rags sitting there, and surrounded by
shreds and tatters.
But one may feel pathos in scenes where
the actors are conscious of nothing but a
rude comfort. I once encountered an old
tramp sitting by the wayside; his heels were
drawn up close to his seat and with his arms
he embraced his knees while he smoked. Before him was -a small fire of' sticks, at one side
of him  was his bundle tied up in a red




202             FOOT NO TES.
pocket-handkerchief, and overhead were the
branches of a dog-wood. Slender needles of
rain were beginning to come from the leaden
clouds, and I thought to comfort the man
with a word of friendly attention; but he
gave me a bow which revealed a wealth of
animal enjoyment and made me feel as if I
were the poorer man.
In the fall there is no lack of things which
are pathetic; most people drink their cider
and eat their apples with a slight flavoring
of sadness as soon as the leaves have fallen,
and the frosts have killed all'
THE POKE-WEED.
This plant, (Pizytolacca decandra), variously
known as skoke, pocan, garget and pigeonberry, is altogether the most noteworthy
herbaceous perennial which I ever encounter
hereabouts.  Growing to the height of nine
feet, and being, I believe, the only species
which in this region is included in the natural order Pzytolaccacece, it has something of
the grandeur and isolation of genius. I often
find myself turning aside to get a nearer look




POKTE- WEED.            203
at it, just as we go out of the way to steal
glimpses at unusual men or beautiful women.
Poke grows more or less in all sorts of
soil, but seems to prefer those which are rich
and moist. In the spring I have seen a circle
of these plants growing around the edges of
the blackened patches of earth which are
made in the turf when we burn a brush-heap
When the timber has been cut off from the
sides of a ravine, much poke starts up in the
bottom of the hollow, growing with great
vigor, in company with the sprouting stumps
of chestnut.  It delights in the rich deposits
of sand and gravel and ordure which are
washed from the highway into the angles of
the fences. The mossy stakes, the interlocked
rails, and the smooth, purple stems of the
poke-weed, then make a little group which
invite a second glance.  It sometimes gets
into a safe corner in the vicinity of a barn
where it grows amazingly, overtopping the
fences and outglorying everything in its
neighborhood. It thrives on the rocky promontories which jut into the Sound, where it
can feel the moist breath of the surges. It




204            FO0 T NOTES.
loses none of its charms there, but growing in
green niches along the cliffs, it blends its
beauty with that of rocks, spotted with lichens,
with that of the coral-fruited barberry, and
with the splendor of the pepperidge trees
and  Virginia-creepers which  have mingled
their scarlets to outblaze everything.
The men who doctor horses occasionally
make use of poke-root for a seton. In places
where it is not native, people sometimes put
it in their gardens to grow there in company
with the medicinal herbs which are supposed
to be good for the women and children. A
farmer gossiping with his neighbor in a stable,
begs a piece of the root to plant at home,
and thus poke extends its acquaintance.  The
autumnal beauty of most plants is richest in
the flower or in the leaf, but the glory of
poke, as another has said, is in the color of
its stem.  Its purple is regal, and it takes a
strong hold on the imagination of. men.  I
have known the sovereign people, when marching in procession, to'carry canes cut from the
stalks of poke, to add to the pageantry.
The habit of this plant is such that the




POKE- WEED.             205
year always seems too short to bring it to
maturity.  Its racemes of flowers are borne
on the extremities of the branches, which at
once push on to produce new fruit.  Thus
when the frost comes and kills the foliage
and flowers, leaving the purple stems to grow
paler and paler after each succeeding frost,
you feel toward the great ruin, as you do
toward your friends who have never had a
fair chance.




XXIII.
HE  powers which build  the great
shops along the Quinnipiac, are in no
haste to disturb the little peakedroofed saw-mills which men have built on the
brooks; and I am glad of it. I everywhere
find signs of great charity and toleration, as
well as newness, in the heart of the Being
who looks after men and nature, and I have
concluded that a man who wishes to enjoy
himself, needs to be something of an old fogy.
Why should we be in a perpetual fret about
progress, when so many agents are at work
softening and beautifying everything that is
or ever has been; planting lichens where the
quarrymen have been at work, twining vines
about the dead trees, and putting a rude
music into the throats of blue-jays and
ravens? Nevertheless, I am going to spend
my money for.the best and freshest things
the age can show. 1 notice a great many
people who are somewhat anxious about the




COAMONV SOUNVDS.          207
far-off and ideal, just as if somebody had
blundered when the near-at-hand and common
were made. I should be sorry to learn that
I have ever said anything to increase this
unrest, there are so many who need lullabys
and some one to amuse them  with a basswood whistle. We are all hungry for some
sort of beauty. In many places the women
talk of pretty men, as if prettiness, rather
than power, were a desirable quality. in a
man; and I wonder how it is homely people
are ever born; but this is a matter, which
corrects itself; for when it comes to getting
married, a woman generally joins hands with
the strongest man who happens to want her.
The marks of progress toward the true and
beautiful, can be seen everywhere. I hear
music when I go by the rich man's house,
and I hear it when I pass the dwellings of
men who own neither farms, nor shops, nor
offices; but I don't forget to keep my ears
open to such melody as there is in all the
COMMON SOUNDS.
I listen to familiar sounds because they are
old,: and therefore pleasurable and half.poetic.




208            FOO0 T VOTES.
The noise made by the most common industries  soon  becomes  encrusted  with  such
lichens as the memory plants, and then it
becomes the poet's property.  We like to
listen to the hooting of owls and to the
cawing of crows, but it takes some time to
outgrow the desire to throw stones which
we felt when we first heard a peacock or a
Guinea-hen.  Time and use, softening the
rigors of our hard common-sense, are always
at work making every-day things more tolerable. On some of the farms I notice great
well-sweeps rudely balanced in rough crotches
cut in the woods. There is a large billet of
wood fastened to one end of the sweep, and
at the other end is the well-pole, made
smooth for the hands. Hanging to it is a
black, iron-bound bucket which disappears
within the weather-beaten curb and plunges
down the well, lined with mosses and crowned
at the top with a circlet of polypod brakes
pointing at the water. It will be some time
before our patent well-curbs with their winches
and self-filling-and-emptying buckets will be
able to charm the imagination like the old
well'poles and sweeps which make a sharp




CoMMON SO UNDS.           209
angle against the sky.  If I write  about
familiar sounds, it should be done with a
melody and rhythm like that which the woodsawyer makes.
My path seldom fails to cross the railroads;
I never get out of the hearing of the engines.
The whistle of the locomotive is the voice of
the nineteenth century, and it has a great
deal to say in this region. It is always saying "Be strong and don't be small; do your
best; be practical and drive straight at your
mark; lose no time in dreaming, or in vain
regrets!"  Farmers' boys, who hoe corn all
alone in fields remote from the railways,
sometimes hear the faint whistle of the engines
or the rumbling of the cars on the distant
bridges, and a feverish discontent gets into
their blood, and they are eager to go where
men live in throngs, and where the tide of
life is deep and strong and has no eddies.
The roads which pay the- best always shout
and shriek the most loudly, for the same
reason, I suppose, that rich men are allowed
to make the most talk in some places.
Along the Quinnipiac and in' the towns one'4




210            FO0 T NO TES.
hears the buzzing of saws, the loud thuds of
the drop-presses, and much noise of machinery.
In the morning and at noon the uproar of
steam-whistles and steam-gongs, a good deal
toned down by the distance it has traveled,
comes to me from the great shops and factories where men are called together to work
in gangs under foremen. The subordination
which prevails in the shops, aided, perhaps,
by Christianity, is beginning to have its effect
upon the men of Connecticut, who, I think,
are the most mannerly people among whom
i have ever traveled. The children are so
deferential in  their address, I am  without
fear of disrespect when 1 walk among them.
But. we shall not very soon bear so many
marks of an oppressive society as do the
Englishmen who mix their talk with many
servant-like " Sirs."
The rattle and clack of looms in the clothfactories make a din which impresses me like
the heat of a great bonfire; the hot tongues
of sound dart at me and scorch my hearing
like the sharp jets of flame. In some places I
am arrested by the thunder which comes from




COMMONV SO UNDS.          211
the shops where forging is done by triphammers. At the foot of Mount Carmel,
where a brook comes pouring down among
the high rocks which are dotted with cedars
and crossed by the paths of workmen, is a
place where men work amid the grandeur of
the mountain and the clanging and cracking
of the trip-hammers. I have been there when
the air was darkened by falling snow, and
watched the forge-men'flitting about in the
red glare of the furnaces, and listened to the
thunderous echoes which rolled back from the
dark sides of the mountain, or crept away
along its base, till I was ready to imagine
that Jupiter was thundering while he made
his own bolts.
Soon after the rye is harvested the sound
of flails may be heard in the farmers' barns.
I sometimes hear two men threshing together,
and then I am inspirited by listening; but
when I hear only one flail going, I am
fatigued, for I go to work to put in the alternate strokes.  If I go near the barns I find
shrewd and weather-beaten men pounding
away at the sheaves; I notice heads of rye




212            FOOT NO TES.
hanging down between the poles over the
barn-floor, and 1 see heads of timothy and
red-top on the sides of the hay-mow in the
great bay. I hear the rustle of the straw and
the patter made by the kernels of grain falling back upon the floor. I have also been in
churches and heard the minister pounding
away at his theme, when I was sure he was
threshing straw, for I could not hear the
kernels of thought falling any where when I
listened. After the flails have ceased then
comes the muffled rattle of the fanning-mills.
I notice threshing-machines at work, but they
can't bewitch the considerate men who still
have faith in the hickory swingel tied to the
flail-staff with tough eel-skin, and so they
continue to mingle their flail-music with the
whistle of engines and the intonings of telegraph-lines.
There is always something to be heard in
the  farm-yards, where  the  domestic fowls
gather around the opening to the barn-floor.
The cocks bear their red crests very high,
and the hens are at work, with their tails in
air and their heads down, to. search after




COMMON SOUNDS.           213
seeds, stopping once in a while to scratch a
little or to take a wider look.  The cocks
are always triumphant and crow at all times,
never being'cast down except by jealousy.
In the spring-time when it pays to look after
eggs, I hear a great deal of cackling about
the barns, just as I notice much talking in
some places where children are born. A little
later when the hen begins to get anxious
about eggs and chickens one may hear much
fierce clucking.  The hens when off duty or
undisturbed by their passions, walk about in
a lazy and reflective manner, and say crake,
crake, crake.
About the middle of June the farmers begin to pick out the tangled patches of grass
which grow in the best places around the
barns. The walker can then see men with their
loins girded up for mowing, and he can hear
the swish of their scythes. The mowers, each
with a black spot at his left arm-pit, step into
the points of the shadows which lie on the
ground, and make pleasant music with their
rifles and whetstones. The man who sharpens
his scythe with a stone, makes a lively, ring



214            FOOOT NOTES.
ing clatter, but the queer men who trust to
the old-fashioned rifle, play a dull, wooden
tune, which never wakes the echoes.  When
the farmers begin haying on their smoother
lands, one can not fail to hear the sound of
the mowing-machines, now  rising and then
falling, now swelling and now dying away,
as it creeps up from sultry meadows, where
the resistless engine is sweeping around the
big square of red clover.  The noise of the
mowing-machine became poetic at once, it
was so suggestive of rest to any one who
had ever swung a scythe.  Since the coming
of this great singer and worker, the farmers
have seen some halcyon days, and it has
become much easier to believe in the millenniu m.
In places remote fromn the great highways
I find men in corn and potato fields, who
watch the great world as from  an observatory, and who make much clicking with their
hoes against the stones.  If I inquire for the
best road,'the rattle of the hoe stops and the
clack of tongue begins.  The man asks for
my knowledge of the world, And after we




COMMON SO UzNDS.          2I 5
have finished our barter in words, he resumes
his clatter among the stones while he digs his
Peach-blows, Mercers, or Black Carters.  In
the old pastures and along the roadsides, I
hear the dull, heavy tinkle of the cow-bell,
and in most places I hear dinner-bells; but
once in a while a blast from an old-fashioned
tin-horn comes to me from some farm-house,
where father sits down with his family to a
dinner of boiled pork, hot rye-bread, vegetables, and cider drawn from a musty barrel.
On a clear frosty morning, I sometimes hear
the loud chucking made by the wheels of
loaded wagons which are passing along the
roads.  I hear the splash of hoofs on wet
nights, and on other nights there is the jar of
feet on the ground, the hitting of iron shoes
against the stones, the faint rumble of light
wagons driven rapidly across the bridges of
the Quinnipiac, and the shouts of revelers
who have descended a great way. from  the
Puritans. The dogs bark at you at all times,
and make dashes at your clothing.  When a
dog barks at me I always think it is his master who is barking.  You may think your




2 6            FOOT NOTES.
own thoughts about the man who keeps a
dog to express the inhospitality, suspicion and
ferocity which he himself dares not avow.
In the winter, when the frost, like some
ghostly ax-man, is making the trees crack,
the wood-choppers come to the timbered
knolls which feed the rills; they go to work,
cutting the stumps very low and the brush
very fine, and they fill the woods with the
sounds of their axes.  I sometimes stop to
listen to their noise, and to watch for the
blows which are made when the.ax cuts
across the grain, or for those which utter a
deep-toned choop when a great chip is loosened.
At these times one can hear the loud crashes
made by the falling trees, which stir up far-off
echoes and make the earth groan.  The oxteamsters come to the woods after the choppers, and I see them coming down the hills
with the heavy-laden sleds which creak on
the snow, and I hear them shouting at their
oxen, while they walk at the heads of their
teams to restrain them with blows from a
whip.




LOOK AN-D LISTEN.              217
LOOK AND LISTEN.
Once, in the glad beginning of the year,
When flocks of honking geese did northward fly,
A noted three —a busy, bustling wife,
A merry maid, a crooked, bearded croneWent forth to sniff the air and look and listen.
That thrifty, careful dame did nothing hear
Except the cackle of her spotted hens,
And tale of neighbor passing in the road,
Who spoke of one as wed, or born, or dead.
That gleesome, giddy girl would only hear
The robins in the fragrant poplar trees,
And the hum of bees among the snowy plums.
But she of withered jole could nothing hear
Except the tearful strain of mourning doves,
And dismal plaint of lonely, starving owls.
And each one hearing only what she did,
Thought herself wiser, shrewder than the rest.
There was that day, a solitary manA stalwart seer —who went not out at all,
But staid within, and watched from morn till night
To hear the word of God; and when it came,
He knew himself a softer, meeker man,
And shrewder, wiser far, than all the rest.




XXIV.
- 7HEREVER I travel I find a plenty
It_/~]x I of signs that remind me how much
BI'  jrl men live by eating.  One may get
a great deal of nourishment in other places
besides at the table, but for all that I always
find it necessary to take bread with me when
I spend a day on foot.  In the morning you
may see men going along the roads, or across
the lots, to their work, each one carrying
his dinner-pail and cup; on a summer noon
you may see them eating their bread and
meat in the shade; in the fall when the air
gets icy, these dinner parties are held in the
broad patches of sunshine on the south side
of some bank or pile of lumber.  When I
come home in the twilight, I meet men hurrying to suppers that are warmed by such
heat and flavored with such spices as mother
and the children can give.  I once saw the
blue-shirted blacksmith getting ready to go




BREAD.               219
to his tea: standing in the dark square of the
shop-door, with a faint glimmer from the
forge behind him, he stared hard at me, as
if smiting an iron, and then he stooped to
wash himself in a pail of water placed on the
floor; putting his hands together like a dipper, he dashed his face with half a pint of
water, and bringing up the liquid first with
one hand, and then with the other, he washed
his arms to the elbows.  The roadside turf
shows burnt places hardly larger than my
cap, and they tell where vagabond cooks
have squatted to boil some tea or coffee in a
tin cup, resting on two small stones.
You may notice some scrambling to get
the means for luxurious feeding. It is indeed
covered up by the snatching after wealth,
but look closely into the matter, and you will
see the hungry scramble to get the best bits.
The girl who does my work don't see how
there can possibly be too many good things
for the table.  I am myself looking out for
better grapes than the Isabella and Delaware
to plant in my own garden. But the luxuries
don't seem to be intended for everybody;
they are not always within reach.




w2 2o          FOOT A'OTES.
A little genius, I imagine, goes further than
money in the business of living well. If a
man is hungry for the good things, and can't
get all he wants, let him put a piece of
unbuttered bread in his pocket, and go on
foot to the pond or the woods. I have
tramped to the mountain before now, and
rested myself on a carpet of hemlock boughs
spread upon the snow, while 1 ate my piece
of wheat-meal bread, and warmed my feet by
a fire that sent its smoke curling upward
among the branches of a hemlock tree. At
such times I have found a wondrous flavor in
common food, and I have been filled with
increased respect for my diet, and for those
women who stay at home to hover over the
delicacies of the table.
It is not easy for one to separate himself
from all luxury. You cannot go off to spend
a day on the road, without taking some appetizing thing, perhaps a cooky seasoned with
sugar from the West Indies, and ginger from
the East, just as our books are flavored with
thought brought from Greece, and Rome, and
Hindoostan. He is called a poor man, and a
poor scholar, who can not mix his food with




BREAD.                2 2 1
foreign spices, and his native thought with
some  idea gathered  in  far-off times and
places.  He is a brave man who dares to
speak the simple thought of his town; and
she is a brave cook who dares to invite her
guests to partake of dishes seasoned with
sage, or caraway, summer-savory, or fennel.
Having seen the vagabonds eating in a
hurried and beggar-like fashion, with their
noses close to their plates, I have concluded
that all men don't eat the same things although
they may sit at the same table and dip from
the same dishes.  If my senses only are concerned in my eating, I miss some part of my
nourishment.  He eats the most highly seasoned dishes, who can bring intellect, imagination, and love to his table.  With this in
view, walking to get an appetite, is not a bad
thing, but it is not the best.  A  man who
really walks has shaken off some part of his
animal, and he brings home a new man to
sup with him. If I have neither read of India
nor traveled there, how can its spices appeal
to any part of me except my senses?  I know
something about the sea-shore; and therefore




222             FOO0 T NO TES.
I smell the odors of the beach whenever I eat
clams, and I find myself the owner of vast
salt-meadows without being obliged to cut
the marsh-grass and stack it on piles driven
into the mud at the base of the stack-poles.
The man who drinks at a forest spring, from
a shell tinted on the inside as with rosy
morning light, not only quenches his thirst,
but he drinks a little of the sea.  Men and
women sometimes eat bread and drink wine
in churches with much solemnity of circumstance, as if they were also eating the living
word of God.  If this ceremonial is really
what it seems to be, it is the very highest
kind of eating, and it should at once be made
a perpetual rite in all our dining-rooms.




xxv.
ERE  all things right, I have no
I doubt that every one of us would
_ do his duty.  There is no lack of
people who will do a little walking on a
warm  May day, when the apple-trees are
loaded with bloom as with snow, when the
air is dense with perfumes, and when there is
a great hum of bees at work in the orchards.
But if a man has work to do, it is not best
to be too particular about the conditions,
unless, perchance, he has beans to hoe, for
that is a job which must be done in dry
weather. I have seen a great deal of picking
for the best times and things: indeed, most
people act as if they thought they should be
happy if they could only have the pick of
things. If I wanted to be sure of pain I
would take the liberty to cull for myself. It
is bravest to take things as they come, and
let the heavens choose for us; nevertheless,




224            FOOT NOTES.
I will, if need be, grapple with my circumstances and shape them all I can. What if
we are cast down and don't get what we
want? At such times we can dig a little
deeper into things, just as the farmers in a
dry season improve the chance to deepen
their wells. It is not best to overrate the
sunny banks and cushioned seats. Let no
man be afraid to take.a good broad section
of life; let him cut right across from bark to
pith, like butchers cutting through the red
meat and the fat, through gristle and bone,
to make their steaks. Most people like to
have it known that they know enough to stay
in when it rains; but I have found that there
is something to be had by
WALKING IN THE RAIN.
He who walks on a rainy day does a kind
of wet thinking. His thoughts are faded by
the rain; they come to him dripping with
water; and all his ideas are a little misshapen,
like' the things one sees on the bottom of a
pool. The people who walk about upon the
wet earth seem to be repeating the miracle




WALKA~ING IN THE RAIN~.      225
of walking on the water. Men emerge from
the mist and then disappear in it, and they
impress one like quaint forms of vapor which
flit and vanish.  I more than believe the
doctors who tell me that a man's body is
about nine-twelfths water.
Thick coats and umbrellas are good things
for the body on a rainy day, but how' shall a
man resist the down-pouring of water when
it threatens to flood his soul?  A vague sense
of disaster comes and goes in the heart of a
man who has walking to do on a wet day.
He shivers with a dim sort of terror when
the drenching mists pour over the hills, and,
surging among the trees, settle down on pond
and river: he feels a touch of awe, as if he
had seen ghostly hands in the clouds, and he
is stirred with a faint reverence that springs
from fear. Good men sometimes tell me that
their most crystal beliefs become a little
opaque on rainy days and that the millennium
seems to be somewhat postponed. But there
are days when the spirit of frolic is in the
storm,  when the fancy is thronged  with
misty nothings bright as the drops which the
rain has left on the trees.
I5




226            FOOT NOTES.
If you walk on a wet day you are pelted
by some other things besides the slanting rain
ivhich soaks the knees of your trowsers, and
damages your wristbands and  shirt-collar.
There is no sympathy for you in your predicament; you are an actor, for all those who
look on; and the wetter you get, and the
more disaster you have, the better you do
your part; and so the pit cheers all the more
loudly.  I think most people have the habit
of looking at the world as a show put on the
boards for their particular amusement. I have
seen many people who lounge and wait for
some trivial cause to rush into the crowd
where they can stare at the small show, like
boys who run to the wayside to see the
wagons of a traveling circus.  Does your
house take fire, young men with their sweethearts will come to your shpw arm  in arm
as on gala days.  Has your little victory
carried you upward, or has your tragedy
pulled you down;'tis all the same for those
who look on; they have had their tickle and
you have had their cheers, and mayhap their
jeers.
By carefully estimating how  much water




WALAING IN THE RAIN.           2 7
your coat will absorb without wetting your
under-clothing, and by industriously dodging
from one shelter to another during the pauses
in the fall of rain, you can, if obliged to,
make a fair journey on a drizzly day.  I
sometimes go into the bar-room of a dingy
wayside tavern that is rank with odors and
with such associations as gather about old
places that have seen a great deal of human
life of one sort or another.  At other times
I get shelter in a farmer's wood-shed, where
I can note the saw-buck and the wood-saw,
and the broom and mop which hang at the
back-kitchen door. When I take to the road
again, I leave a cluster of faces at the window: the round faces of the children, and
mother's face which has grown paler and
thinner, or perhaps more fleshy and red, since
her trial of wifehood in a lonely farm-house.
When I take shelter in a cider-mill, I have
the smell of pomace, and I observe the old
barrels that have been repaired with new
hoops.  I see the dripping cider-press, and
the deep path worn by the horse that went
round and round to grind the apples. I listen
to the moans of the wind and to the water




2 28            FOO0 T NO TES.
which drips from the eaves and falls into the
puddles on the ground. When a walker can
do no better he can place his back against
the lichens on the dry side of a tree, and
when the sprinkle is over, he can hear the
drops of water as they fall from the branches
and patter on the dead leaves.
A man traveling at night and on strange
roads when the drizzle threatens to become
a flood, is subject to some -illusions.  His
thoughts become so water-soaked that he has
little idea of heaven, except as a very dry
warm place. On such nights I have passed
farm-houses, and seen where the kitchen
lights fell on the trunk of an ancient elm that
over-topped gable and chimney. I have
thought the people there to be dwellers in
paradise. I would forget how likely it was
that those well-housed folks were only discussing the prices of hay and milk, or the
small deeds of their neighbors, or at best doing their small share of threshing at the bundle of daily news.
Spattering me with mud as they go past,
the farmers drive off to town, to do some
business that has been put off until a rainy




WALKING IN THE RAIN.         2 29
day. I find them doing chores about their
sheds, and I see them in their houses, sitting
there with pantaloons tucked in their bootlegs, ready for a start on the first sign of
fair weather; for a farmer can never unbend
his bow. Before the rain they go hurrying
about their meadows and  stubble-fields to
protect their hay and sheaves of grain. As
soon as the storm is past you may sometimes
see them  hoeitg the young corn which has
been blown aslant by the wind; or you may
see the long scratch in the road where the
plowman had crossed it with his team when
he went back to his work.  Released from
business on rainy days,, when.farm-work
slackens a little, the boys hasten off to the
trout-brooks, where you may find them standing in the drizzle, patiently  holding  their
poles over the eddies, to catch fish and a
little joy mixed  with  water.  The  earthworms come to the surface where the ground
is rich, and they make crooked lines in the
soft earth; fresh gravel has been swept into
the. angles of the fences; the pebbles in the
highway look cleanly; the hollow places in the




30o            FO 0T NOTES.
road hold broad puddles which reflect the
dun-colored clouds: and the brooks which go
under the road, have become turbid with soil
washed from the plowed fields.
On wet days the twigs of dog-wood and
birch take a wash, and they give their brightest
smiles to the hardy men who go to the
woods to smell the incense which steams up
from the ground where the leaves of oak and
maple and tulip are rotting above the roots
of spikenard, sassafras, and ginseng. He is a
gross wooer who only stares at nature. I have
sometimes gone to the pine-woods on a misty
day to walk on the wet leaves which hush
the sounds of my feet.  I smell the odors of
pitch, and think myself as well employed as
*when listening to overture or symphony, for
I am sure the pineries appeal to something
in me deeper than sense.  I am then made
ashamed of shallow talk, and I resolve to load
my words with greater meaning. In fact, the
breath of New England is resinous and inspiring; and some of her literary men have
sat under pine-trees until their books have
an odor of terebinth.




XXVI.,!,    IHERE is a great feast of colors held
in October, when everybody goes
J**  l |out to sup on crimson and scarlet
and orange and gold.  But it is followed by
a long wet day filled with the patter of raindrops and the faint noise of leaves dropping.
When the walker goes out again he hears the
uproar which his feet make among the fallen
leaves, and he knows the feast is over. There
are some oaks and a few shrubs in the
meadows which still hold on to their colors.
After this the painted leaves have a little of
that liberty which goes before ruin; they
dance, and circle round and round, and run
forward and back, until, drenched, and faded,
and frozen, they creep into corners and und-er
the bushes where they find rest, and wait
for their resurrection.
I think most people have a drab-colored
experience as soon as the frost has faded the




232            FOO0 T NO TES.
last leaves of the scarlet oak.  They expect
to be color-hungry until the winter evenings,
when the lamps fill the windows with red
squares of light and make the snow look
ruddy; and when we are wont to settle down
and please ourselves with the tints of wallpaper, tapestries and carpets.
But why should I go to the town to see the
people who ride in sleighs and who wrap
themselves in robes lined with leopard-cloth
and fringed with red stuff? Why should I
go to the city to look at the scarlet operacloaks; or to a church to study the colors of
the winter bonnets?  I have business in the
naked woods and among the thickets, as well
as the farmer who goes there to cut a long
blue beech for an  ox-whip, or the schoolmaster who steals off to the bushes to get a
switch for his work.  These are some of
the places to which I go to select, my winter
colors.  I once walked to the mountain on
an early spring day to please myself with the
color of lichens and tree-trunks; and when I
wanted something particularly appetizing' I
sought after the scarlet cladonia. On the way




IN NO VEMiBER.            233
I saw where a woman had set her geraniums
out of doors to air them, and I was led to
contrast my neutral tinted world with the
gaily colored one which women are glad to
make for themselves.  That woman had been
keeping a morsel of the summer to nibble at,
while I had been trying to make the winter
yield all I wanted.  But it is not best to
think ourselves deserted when nature puts
off her fine clothes; it is better to go back
to her even if she is clad in sober dress, just
as we go back to our work, or to our poems,
or to our science after we have read the
column of flame and blood and sulphur-smoke
in the daily paper.  If you can do that you
will find many a summer day which comes
straggling in to join the column
IN NOVEMBER.
The day is fine
As mulled wine,
In gray and chill November;'Tis ripe and prime and yellow,
Arched with blue, and mellow
As any in September.




234             EQOO  NOTES.
234
It is so freely poured,
As from a giant gourd,
I'll snatch a bit before it onward rushesPerchance a hint
Of love, or glint
Of light which on the mountain blushes.
Many of the winter colors, especially those
which seem to belong to the wood and
thickets along the Quinnipiac, are such fitful
things  and  so illusive, it is  hard  to  tell
whether they belong  to anything solid, or
whether they are not caused by something
in your eye.  If you attempt to make sure
of them, you hardly get more than children
do when they try to gather a handful of fog.
I am sometimes arrested by a thicket which
fascinates me by the variety of its delicate
and vapor-like colors.  If I turn  my steps
toward it the spell is broken.  I find myself
standing before a clump of bushes none toQ
good for the fagot-makers.  When I get far
enough away the fine tints reappear, just as
the phantom-lights in a haunted house are relit when the intruder leaves.  The attempt
to catch these color sprites, is like trying to




WIN.TER COLORS.          235
seize the spirit of poetry to tie her down in
your wordy lines. A man that is allowed to
commune with the colors of winter may brag
a little if he will only do it when alone.
In the winter, and in fact at all times when
the trees are lifeless, the woods are veiled in
a- purple mist which is chiefly owing to the
color of the youngest twigs.  These tinted
sprouts are the  dreamer's property.  The
practical men who go into the woods to get
fuel or lumber, don't take this painted bush;
they select the mossy and blackened boles of
trees. When I go to the town I look at the
young sprouts who make a show in the streets;
but if I want the strong pieces of timber, I
seek out the men who have grey beards and
ashen locks, and who wear thick overshoes
and mufflers in winter.
The pale-green pitch-pines and hemlocks,
black when seen at my distance, contrast
strongly with the snow  upon the sides of
Beseck and Higby.  On open winter days,
when, the snow is gone, the mountains display
their best colors; pink and rose, and shadows
that are blue and amethyst. I sometimes get




236           FOOT NOTES.
a glimpse of the light-blue hills which lie
beyond the mountains and join the earth to
the sky. A boy who has a home from which
he can overlook the purple hills to where a
white spire stands in the blue haze, and
thence onward, to a pale-blue spot in the far
distance, will never be content until he has
gone abroad, for he is hugging the sweet
illusion that the dwellers in that far-off spot
are more leisurely, loving and bright, than
his fellows.  We do not know but the great
azure sky, with its wild play of clouds, amber
and violet, crimson and scarlet, and gold, and
leaden black, is spread over us in order to
keep our imaginations stirred with thoughts
of eternity, and heaven, and hell. I have
myself had a great deal of trouble from this
far-off spot of outer blue; but walking has
corrected some of my notions.
From  the top of Mount Tom  1 can see
Long Island lying in the haze which rests on
the edge of the sea. Looking in that direction has always been pleasant; so I put on
my knapsack one day, and went across the
Sound. I found a village on a small bay




WINTER COLORS.           237
where the men build ships, and where the
women allow one another to wear their sunbonnets in the street. I afterwards walked
on solitary roads which led me among pines
and oaks, and across old fields, until I came
to a weather-beaten town inhabited by men
who gathered their harvests from the bottom
of the sea. But I saw no men or women
who knew not evil, or who had not a battle
to fight.
The hillsides, after the wood-cutters have
been there to cut off the large trees, spring
up again with young oaks, chestnuts and
maples, which sometimes take the appearance
of a delicate ash-colored vapor. The flowering dog-wood or box, grows very abundantly
on all our rocky hills. Its twigs have a dark
garnet color, suffused with' a whitish bloom.
When I go near enough to these shrubs, their
young shoots seem to blend into a mass of
ethereal color that is almost within the reach
of my hand. The red osier dog-wood, grows
along the banks of all the streams; its young
twigs are light-maroon. When seen in groups
at a distance, this shrub gives a glow to the




238            FOOT NOTES.
river-meadows like a deep blush on a pale
face. If I leave the road to get a closer look,
1 find the dog-wood growing in company
with alders that have amaranth catkins, with
button-bushes and reddish-twigged willows,
anad with a wild grape-vine which has spread
over everything and made a faint purple mist
with its own branches. The brook where
this thicket stands, sometimes shows a hole
in the ice with silver edges, through which
the water is seen rippling over stones that
are olive-brown with slime.
The yellow willow is native to the banks
of the Quinnipiac, besides being planted on
the railway embankments, and about the farmhouses, and by mill-ponds where it makes a
double show by casting its shadow in the
water when the ice is gone. These trees are
scattered all along the river, and when seen
from a hill which commands the valley, they
strike the fancy like warm patches of summer
light which have lingered to cheer our winter
landscape. At this season the stems of the
white birch, two or three of which often
diverge from the same root,. display their




WINTER' COLORS.           239
chalky angles against the dark sides of the
forests, as on a blackboard. The branches of
this tree are brownish crimson when seen in
a mass after the rain.  The first time I
noticed the color of the birches, was while I
was walking on one of those rainy days when
the sensibilities are blunted, and when the eye
can only gather images which may possibly
come back to a man and please him while he
sits before the fire engaged in sorting and
piecing together the scraps that fill his memory.  I had reached a place in the road
overlooking a wide growth of young birches,
when I was suddenly flooded by their wealth
of rich color, and made sensible that I was
all alive. Since then it has been easy to believe
that wet days have peculiar gifts in store for
those who go abroad in the rain.
The thickets of blackberry briers which
grow in the pastures and in the angles of
the rail-fences, are dark-red. It is not uncommon to find a brier which keeps a few green
leaves far into the winter.  The black raspberry grows in the same places with the
blackberry. These briers are a light-maroon,




240            FOO T NOTES.
slightly obscured  by a bluish-white bloom.
Their delicate color and graceful curves cheer
the walker at all times when. the leaves are
not on.  This brier is sometimes cultivated
in fields, where it makes a lilac-colored mist
that seems to rest on the ground as lightly
as do the vapors which creep along the surface of'a pond.
The slender stems of the dewberry, creeping over the heaps of stones along the fences,
make a net-work of reddish-colored threads
that may be observed at almost any time in
the winter.  You may sometimes notice one
or two of these vines that still hold on to a
crimson leaf, and stretch across the lichens
on the top of some grey stone that has been
uncovered by the melting of the snow. The
walker who visits the rocky slopes at the foot
of Mt. Carmel as late as February, can generally find a few pale-scarlet barberries; and
he can prove their acid to be as good for his
thirst as their color is for his eye.  When I
visit Mr. Hokum's muck-swamp I can always
find a few cranberries which grow on the
mossy tussucks, and become darker colored




WINTER COLORS..           241
and sweeter and better after their winter
experience.
It is not wise to think that winter is a pale
and faded thing, or that nature can ever be
careless about her work of tinting. She is a
great deal more thoughtful in this respect
than are the women, or even those men who
delight in short coats and high colors.  It is
because I have been gross and hasty, that I
did not discover this before. The snow which
covers the green fields of winter-rye and the
pale-brown meadows, only leaving narrow strips
of green along the edges of the brooks, and
which hides the village of white houses until it
impresses one like a flock of sheep that has
been buried in  a storm, is tinted by the
sky on fair days, and the shadows of the
trees are a very dark blue to those who are
leisurely and observant.  The poorest colors
of winter may thrill us like prelude or interlude.  I have gone among the trees after I
have sat in libraries, and a pale-brown leaf
which quivered on a beech-tree would please
me more than the leaves of a book.  But
nature seldom fails to have an appetizing bit
i6




242             FOO0 T NO TES.
for the most dainty and feeble.  The redshirted wood-choppers are not the most spicy
things the winter affords. The scarlet berries
of the black-alder blaze and flame till far into
the winter, like a red cloak in the street.
This shrub grows in the wet pastures and
all along the water-courses, where everything
else pales before it. A man passing it-on the
cars may think he has had a glimpse of a
bonfire.
The north side of a wooded bank sometimes offers a combination of objects which
please by their variety of color. The red-brown
trunks of old hemlocks; and the green boughs
of the young ones, the ash-colored stems of
white oak, -the laurels which make a green
lining for the woods in winter, ferns and
lichens, peeping through the snow which
spreads  everywhere.  Green  is so  linked
with our ideas of summer heat, these laurel
banks always make one feel as iif he. had
found a place where he can go and warm
himself.  If you want something that will
make a fiery contrast with the snow  and
laurels, dig: down to the scarlet partridgeberries which grow under the hemlocks.




WINTER COLORS.            243
Winter puts on a great deal of brown in
Wallingford. The oaks and the young beeches
and a few of the maples, keep a part of their
leaves all this season of the year. This habit
seems to be a peculiarity of individual trees
as well as of a species.  Of two  maples
standing close together, one will hold a few
of its leaves every winter, while the other
will be entirely naked.  The leaves of the
scarlet oak are dark-brown; those of the
white and yellow oaks are light brown like
russet leather.  The beech and maple have
pale, whitish-brown leaves. These dead things
often get loosed from the trees, and the wind
tumbles them  about upon the snow  where
they leave marks that arrest you like the
tracks of a bird.  This brown leafage has a,powerful presence and never fails to impress
me. On'very cold days when the wind blows,
these brown things hiss till they make a man
think all the elements hate him; -but on
pleasant days their rich browns please with
their warmth, and their rustle strikes the ear
like a light patter of rain on leafy trees, like
the distant sound of a brook pouring over a
ledge in the forest.




XXVII.
ALWAYS have to cross the Quinnipiac when I return from  a walk
among the eastern hills. At such
times I pass under the gnarled limbs of a
great swamp white oak and the broken limbs
of a large chestnut which shade the gray
oaken bridge. I note the river as it pours
over the dam, where men wade in to catch
lamprey eels.   I watch it creeping away
between banks of alder and willow and dogwood; and it impresses my imagination so
strongly that I am often led to think I have
walked too far, and that I should have done
better had I staid nearer home.
The brooks and rivers all have a presence
which strikes one like the atmosphere of a
living thing. Notwithstanding all our Christianity and science and common sense, I
should not at any time be surprised to meet




UP STREA..       245
a river nymph.  The rivers and ponds must
have impressed the Indians very forcibly, for
they gave them names too strong to be conquered in battle, and too indelible to be faded
with blood.  These Indian names promise to
hover over river and pond and mountain, as
long as the Celtic names have clung to the
same things in Great Britain.  An Indian
name seems to express that unspeakable
quality in pond or brook, which touches the
imagination.  I feel unanswered when I inquire the name of a pond and- only find that
it is called Half-Moon or Metcalf; but if I
hear that it is Magog or Quinnibaug, I am
content, for I know that it is well named.
A river stirs you with a sense of mystery
like the stranger who has not yet told his
story, or like a man who can not show his
pedigree.  Every stream invites me to travel
upward.  I know  where the Quinnipiac is
going; it is hastening to wander among the
stacks of marsh-hay in the salt-meadows, it is
hurrying to freshen the oysters which belong
to the men of Fair Haven, and to lose itself
in the sea which booms against the coast.




246            FO0 T NO TES.
But who can say what man's cattle quench
their thirst at its head-waters, or from what
banks its brooks ooze, or through what hemlock thickets and rabbit-covers they run, or
whose water-wheels they turned when young?
It is not enough that you tell me all the
rivers rise in the sea; for that is only doing
like the men who, after justly referring everything to God and the devil, say they have
no need of your science.  I have traced a
river to the mountain, and found its birth as
grand as its death in the sea. It is easier
to go down stream; most men go that way,
and they seem to be rewarded. The people
who go to the mouths of large rivers, build
the great cities, and they speak confidently
to the nation. But if you look on the map
it will be found that the men who go up
stream, build cities too.
A man in his time comes to more than one
stream where he is promised that the winds
shall be fair, and that there shall be no tugging at the oar, if he will only follow the
current. But I have studied geography somewhat, and have concluded that I shall go up




UP STREAM.              247
stream — whether by scow or on foot it
matters not -until I come to the rivers which
run in the right direction.
The great stream of western travel has
always gone past my door. There are, I
think, but few people who have not at one
time or another thought of embarking on it.
The blood of the nation surges westward in
its veins. Half our children are born with
their heads full of plans for a western settlement. Two of my family, after trying the west,
have come back to New England, and I infer
from this that our blood has nearly lost that
impulse toward the west, which it has felt
for two hundred years. It is not good for a
family to be always a pioneer and a breeder
of frontiers-men.  Frequent  transplantings
only serve to keep a tree small until the
nurseryman can sell it to the man who will
plant it in an orchard. I followed this stream
till I came to Chicago and St. Louis, and until
I heard of San Francisco which stands where
the river pours into the Pacific. These are all
remarkable cities; but Boston standing among
the head waters, seemed the most noteworthy




248             FO0 T NOTES.
town. The more I went west the more I
wanted to go east; I would see the birthplaces
of the nations,, rather than those places where
men forget their genealogies, and where families are lost like the brooks which are used
to irrigate the meadows. The east attracts
me still, and I find that I walk in that direction  more  than  any  other.  I am  more
interested  in the coast of the Atlantic than
in that of the Pacific; I am  less curious
about the Sandwich Islands than about those
Islands which are called British.
Mr. Hokum owns a great farm; and he has
built five large barns upon it, and painted
them.  his dining-room  is hung with fruitpieces, prints of fish, and other appetizing
things, and with a picture of a prize cow
done in oil. The room is still further set off
by a massive black-walnut sideboard which
holds his silver ware. At breakfast his wife
pours his coffee from silver vessels; and at
dinner he spreads a napkin on his knee, and
feeds himself with a silver fork. I do not
know as Mr. Hokum is to blame for having




MR. HOKUM AGAIN.           249
all these things. They are the natural product
of the man's life: you might as well blame
an oyster for making a shell and lining it with
a sort of pearl. I have looked into myself
before now, but I did't find a farm and five
great barns. Maybe I did not see anything
except a small garden, a few "Foot-Notes"
and a little white house, with green blinds
and brass door-plate, standing under the
maples; and it may be that I had a promise
of better things than any which can possibly
spring from my own life.
Mr. Hokum has a good library —two full
cases stretching from the floor to the ceiling -
but he does not pretend to be a literary man;
neither does he make any show of poetry and
sentiment. He is a practical man who knows
the use of things; a farmer who sets the
artist making pictures of his best cattle.
Thinking like a writer, I sometimes imagine
that he and all he has, are a part of my stock
in trade; but when I see his talent for organization and management, I begin to think that
he is one of the men who were born to set
me to work, and that we writers are not so




250            FO0 T NOTES.
important as the editors try to make the
world think. He has had no help from his
family; yet he is not a self-made man, for I
do not exactly believe in that sort of men;
he has simply expanded according to the
original plan made for him, and he has
not been too proud nor too dainty to fight for
elbow-room.




XXVIII.
[IH —-HERE  is always a great deal of busit~ ) | ness going on in the woods and
I meadows; but at this time of the
year when nature is taking a little rest, I am
most alive to the immensity of work that has
already been done.  The amount of work
that has been laid out on the buds of the
blue beaches for example, is amazing -every
bud nicely done up in scales that have their
edges bordered with a color unlike the body.
When I walk up to Meriden I am sometimes
made ashamed of myself-the people there
are always so busy; every man has either a
callus on his palm or an ink-mark on his
finger. I everywhere find men hard at work.
One might suppose that during the two
hundred years which have passed since the
old Puritans came here and began doing
business in peaked hats, knee-breeches and
bell-topped boots, enough work would have




252            FOO0T NOTES.
been done to finish up some things, and entitle
folks to have a play-spell. I do indeed find
some men who have inherited copies of the
Bible and "Saint's Rest" which were printed
in London long before the Revolution, and
old houses that have been beaten on by
storms until their walls are worn thin and are
as full of holes as a basket; but I don't find
any men who are excused from  business because of the work their fathers did.
We have not got our work done yet, and
I am glad of it. I am not a born reformer;
nevertheless I like to see the reformers busy.
Should any one of these enterprising men
find a way to do up the world's entire job
of work, and leave the rest of us to lounge
on sofas, and thrum guitars, and writer sonnets, I would myself turn reformer at once
and smash his infernal monopoly of all the
work.
Next to the grace and love of God -without which a man is a wretched starveling —
I know of no better refreshment than work.
It is good for a man to live so near the
ground that his life and thought shall have




WORK AND AR7:            253
something of that aroma which comes from
the earth when farmers do -their plowing. If
I see a man of genius digging with a spade,
I don't take him for a clod and tell him that
Mr. Hokum wants another hired man, for I
know that he is getting ready to make another
flight. There is a writer of books-within my
circle of. walking who came down from the
thin region of literature some years ago, and
went to managing a milk-farm to refresh himself. I want some one to tell me how it was
that Christ passed by the lily-fingered scribes
and pharisees -who had all the culture that
was then going-and entrusted the blessed
gospel to those fishermen, whose hands and
muscles were toughened and hardened by
rowing, and whose souls were refreshed by
work.
I respect work, hard work, muscular work,
gross work, if you are pleased to call it such:
and it is not too late in the day for me or
for five hundred other men to say so, or to
continue saying so even here in New England
where we think we know  as much. about
work and civilization as any people who ever




254            FOOT NO TES.
bared their arms or bent their backs. I have
seen a wood-sawyer at work in a back yard:
he had a clay-pipe in his mouth, and with his
elbows sticking well out he vibrated his body
up and down while he sawed the sticks of
hickory: I respected his action as only a
little less wonderful than clear seeing and
clear thinking; I knew that his work was
helping the gush of blood along his veins,
for I had seen a "subject" lying on the dissector's red table, and had seen the students
at work with a book of anatomy on the one
hand, and a scalpel-case on the other, carefully dissecting away one curious muscle after
another.  When I have overtaken a woodchopper shambling along the street and carrying his ax in the crook of his elbow with the
helve sticking out behind, I have wished he
could  be something  more  than a simple
worker; but fearful of getting a sniff of
tobacco or whisky, or of hearing some gross
remark, I have resisted-the impulse to put
my hand on his shoulder and tell him that I
should be glad to have him dig in the same
ditch with me.




WORK AND AR:             255
I know that Work thinks he don't get his
share of the good things. He certainly does
deserve more of the white meat and best
slices than he now gets. I saw a man last
summer who had a way of walking up a
telegraph-pole; he fastened himself to the
pole with a leathern belt, and while he fixed
the wires he talked to me of rich men and
riot, until I thought I had found one of the
seeds of a revolution. But he who puts brain
to work with his muscle, will get the best
prizes. While Muscle is at work carrying
his hod of mortar up the ladder, Brain takes
a lease of the mansion and moves in and lets
Muscle go back'to his shanty. When Brain
goes to rest in the church-yard, a tall shaft.of stone is set up to mark his resting-place.
If, however, he is of the sort of men who.go to
the making of books, I notice that you can.not always count on finding the,big stone.
If Work wants to get his share I think he had
better stop business and go to- school.
Men and women make excuses to.me for
being found in their working clothes.  Why
should they, when their hands are no harder




~256      ~FOOT NOTES.
than mine? But I see the devil at work in
the shops and on the farm, and I understand
how it is that we are ashamed of our work.
A certain vagabond has twice called at my
house,-once here, and once in a place far
from this, and has found me helping the girl
at some  heavy  kitchen  work.  I wasn't
ashamed of my job, for it is plainly to be
seen that I am valiant in work when I have
nothing else to do; but for all that, I did
have a faint wish that even this tramp should
know that I do sometimes sit in my best
room and read poems in blue and gold.  If
work seems gross to any man, I know where
the grossness lies. When I am ashamed of
my work, I understand well enough that the
beggar in me, and not the king, has gone out
to work with me.  If I am  faithful to the
task God has given me, I am certain that
every job I get will have an unspeakable
splendor and dignity.
I am going to define my position.  If the
devil or any man attempts to crowd me, and
make me ashamed when I am digging in my
garden, I will fight him as long as there is a




WORK AND ART.            257
bit of pluck in my heart.  I intend to dig in
the last ditch if I have a nrrind to.
I notice an upward tendency nearly everywhere  a tendency for men to quit work and
rise into art.  I often get a glimpse of the
silver linings which men' are always trying to
put into their ragged lives. The dentist who
mends my teeth keeps a clarionet; and the
young man who works in the shop goes home
to wash himself and play on a horn,'Squire
Lomas, the magistrate, does his business in a
dirty office that is furnished with a rusty
stove, a dusty case of books, a broken-legged
table, a few chairs, and a greasy copy of the
Greek Testament for the Catholics to kiss
when they take an oath; but he gilds his
work by writing verses. The milk-man, after
refreshing himself on a farm, has gone back
to writing books. As for me, I walk, and I
read books that don't at all concern my
business.
But if you are asking,
"What is art?" Here is my answer:
Leg of tramp, and toe of dancer.
I7




258              FOOT NOTES.
Sea-shells scooping up the river.
Pointed arrovw snatched from quiver,
Deftly sped against the foeman
By a plumed and laughing bowman,
Bearded wise man gaily teaching
Better things than fill our preaching.
"What is art?" You have my answer:
Leg of tramp, with toe of dancer.




XXIX.
"IHE  prairies seem  to me like vast
deposits of bread and meat scarcely
_____  less wonderful than the deposits of
coal and rock-oil, and I don't wonder that
men with hungry families go west. But I am
told that pedestrians find hard walking in
those western places where the soil is fat with
the elements of wheat and corn and beef and
pork, and where the horseman does up the
tail of his horse in a knot to keep it out of
the mud. I can nearly always find dry walking here in Wallingford where the country
is largely productive of good roads, rye-bread
chestnut timber, paper buttons and Germansilver spoons. Nevertheless, I have had some
hard walking, for there are no guide-boards
around here. The selectmen make good roads
for us, and then leave every man to pick his
own way.




260            FO 0 T NO TES.
The folks in some places have better guidance than I get here in Connecticut. I once
walked in Massachusetts. I found guide-posts
everywhere, and I concluded that the men
who had been paid to do the thinking there,
had not slighted their job. Standing among
trees at the corners of the village green,
among briars and brush at the forks in the
roads, and at the crossing of the ways which
wander off right and left between lines of
stone-wall, were shafts of primeval granite
that told me how  to reach Acton, Concord
and Boston. These stones showed the long
lines of holes drilled by the quarryman, and
they told how earnestly he had wrought to
guide people into the right roads.  I walked
from Marlboro to Groton, and found my steps
so carefully guided as to make me think that
those Massachusetts road-makers expected the
whole world to come sooner or later and
travel in their highways. There are some
men, I think, who can't make a road to reach
their own ends without leaving it wide
enough and safe enough for every other man
to use. But such road-makers are not plenty.




INQUIRING MY WAY.          26I
If you are a man who gets along by traveling
on cow-paths and by-ways, be modest, and
don't ask me to take stock in your road.
When walking I often have to stop and
inquire the way. I get directions from the
horseman, who shows his confidence in the
road he points out, by driving bravely down
it, never stopping to ask me to ride with
him; I seek help from the farmer who is laying wall, and who wears a leathern apron
split up the middle, one-half tied snugly to
each leg; and I watch him  picking up a
stone which he holds against his belly and
then puts on the top of the wall. I once
intercepted a farm-wife when she crossed her
yard; she held a milk-pan in one hand, and
with the creamy finger of the  other she
pointed out the way for me to take, smiling
the while, as if it were a strange thing that
any one need to ask for the road from Guilford to Wallingford. I can always find my
way by asking often enough. Some people
think it is a grand thing to find their way
without inquiring. I have myself belonged to
that persuasion. But one gets along just as




262            FOOT NOTES.
safely by asking as by knowing; besides, it is
more social and humanizing. However, it is
not easy to get full directions for reaching
any place; a man can't be excused from working out his own problems.  No man can
generally tell you more than to "turn to the
right, then. turn to the left, go over the
mountain, and then inquire again at Telus
Todd's."
There is no lack of people who think they
know just where they are: they have no need
of inquiring their way-they are not lost. I
often stop to ask for the right road, but 1 am
not always sure that my informant himself is
not lost. I live one mile from town, and
twelve miles from New Haven, and seventyeight miles from  New  York City, but that
don't prove that I know my whereabouts in
this world. A Concord man asks, " Is Franklin the only man who is lost, that his wife
should be so earnest to find him? Does Mr.
Grinnell know where he himself is?"  My
neighbor, Delaware Perkins, tells the story
of an Indian, who, finding some difficulty in
getting home, concluded that he was lost.




NOT LOST.              263
But after wandering about in vain, he finally
stopped short, and striking himself on his
breast, said to himself,'Indian no lost! Indian  here! Wigwam  lost! " How  many
people are there who, standing in sight of
their own houses can hit their own breasts
and say, "This man is not lost"?  I sometimes feel an impulse to go around and tap
at the hearts of men to see if they really
know where they are.
Knowing that I am desirous of finding the
best paths, many people come to my house
to get me to walk in the roads which they
have found. Other men come to ask about
my routes of travel; they put many questions
but don't stop long for my answers, and so I
conclude these men are more concerned about
their own questions than about any discoveries I have made. Some people admit to
me that they are entirely uncertain about their
own routes-that they are only  trying to
walk in the cow-paths which lie just under
their noses. I judge there is an immense
number of this sort of people who do not
travel at all in any important sense;:they just




264            FO0 T NO TES.
live in the roads like the gipsies, never intending to go anywhere, not believing that there
are any distant places worth going to. I
encounter  these  vagabonds  everywhere.
Sooner or later they' all fall to tinkering:
grinding razors, making books, mending brasskettles, editing newspapers, - all done with
equal short-sightedness. I don't think there
is any need of a man's confessing himself
baffled by the snarl and tangle of roads in
this world. By inquiring often enough a man
can find his way to any place -to heaven if
you please. If I don't find night-walking safe
and easy, I shall wait until daylight and then
hunt up the man who can tell me where to
turn to, the right, and where to the left.
I know that the minister and the lawyer,
and even my neighbor Ravenstone, are doing
something at setting up guide-boards, but for
all that men do go astray on every hand.
When I consider the great number of persons
who can't find their own roads, I am amazed
at the decorous fashion in which people go
about to look after lost men. I meet folks
going to church Sundays; they go leisurely




NOT LOST.               265
in their best clothes, and hope they are doing
all that is necessary for souls in peril. But
why don't they get together in hot haste on
a week day -the blacksmith in his apron, the
painter with paint on his fingers, and  the
farmer in his coarse boots-to make an eager
hunt for the soul who has gone astray, bringing him back, willing or unwilling, and setting
him on the right road?




xxx.
/~[~]T is good for a man to be able to
m~~~11 march in a solid column with his
1J fellows, not caring if his vision is
somewhat limited by the dust, and by the
men on either hand; for there are some
things which can not be done unless you are
willing to touch elbows with your neighbor.
For all that, I like to sit on a fence a little
apart and see the world go by.  But I
am no lounger. I can dig as well in my garden as any man in his; I don't. often leave
my work to see what old trees overshadow
the farm-houses; or to get the earliest pepper-root to eat with my crackers and beef:
I go abroad to see who it is that does all
the work, and who it is that makes the dust
and noise.
I have always found a plenty of practical
men at every turn; but the poets and men of
sentiment have been rather scarce.  I don't




PRAC TICA4L MEz.         267
think I am the only man who has made the
discovery and been amazed.  It may be that
the poets don't show themselves to me.  If
the farmer, who stands on the top of his sled
with his back to the wind, while he drives
his six oxen right into the teeth of a northwestern snow-storm, has a man of sentiment
in his employ, he has not yet taken the pains
to introduce him to me.  If there is a poet
in the store where I go to buy a new saw, I
am sure he is not the man who owns the
goods. He may be that young fellow who
does his work half-heartedly, dreaming the
meanwhile of splendors, and loves, and courtly
people, and sadly perplexing himself because
palaces are not ready-made.  Indeed, most
men seem as if they had been appointed
quartermasters and engineers, they talk so
much concerning the prices of goods, the
uses of raw material, and modes of manufacture; and all this is just as it should be.
There is a great demand for practical men
of one sort or another; there are vacancies
every day which invite the best workmen.
It seems to have pleased God to use these




268             FO0 T NO TES.
men for his warp and filling. I have had my
quarrel with fate for putting the practical
men into all the best places.  I was beaten
in that fight; and I now count it as one of
my victories, for I have felt freer and better
ever since. When I walk in the woods I imagine that nature is more careful to have the
trees yield fire-wood and timber, than she is
to have them  produce flowers.  An oak tree
hangs out its tassels a few days in the spring,
and every body is glad to go out and see
them; but for the rest of the year it can only
show a gray trunk, gnarled limbs and rude
strength and dignity.  If these don't please a
man I think he had better let himself to a
milliner, and learn to make bonnets.
It is somewhat refreshing to look at a
practical man, who holds his imagination
and fancy in strict subjection to reason, who
never forgets the subordination of one thing
to another according to the measure of its
usefulness, and who lets strong-handed performance keep close to all his clear-seeing
and deep-believing. He don't build his house
on a hill-top in order to look at the sea; he




PR ACTICAL MElV.          269
puts it at the foot of the hill where he can
have water run into his kitchen, and then if
he wants anything of the sea he goes to the
top of the hill and gets it.  If he is in love,
he goes a wooing; if he is angry, somebody
quails; he don't sing his love, neither does
he try to make his scorn rhythmical. You
and I may celebrate him in verse if we think
him big enough for that service.  He raises
apples to eat and grapes to sell, not caring
much for the curious striping of the one or
the bloom of the other; nevertheless the
fruit is forthcoming and the markets are
better supplied.  I sometimes encounter men
engaged in religion, philanthropy and art,
whom I call practical. When such men go
to work in those places, people are made
better, things are righted, and beauty goes
abroad..
Having noticed that some of the men who
sit in garrets and write books, have a quarrel with the men who have no time for
sonnets, I resolved to go into my garret
sometime and do justice to those men who
can't prate of their sentiments. However, I




270           IFOOT NOTES.
soon found that nature had a conspiracy with
our practical folk. I began to suspect that
the men who cannot live by bread alone, do
feel a little oppressed by the sharp fellows
who are able to buy the picture when done,
and the statue when finished.
But the dreamers and workers are not so
unlike. I once went out of my way to visit
the homes of certain men whose books had
pleased me with their brilliancy.  I did not
find those prose writers and poets living in
the best houses, and so I was forced to conclude that they had put all their brightness
into their books, while their practical neighbors had been putting all their glitter into
their houses and on their front fences.
I, too, have had a chafe with the practical
men who squander beauty. 1 raise my apples
to make sauce, and I have a surplus of grapes
for market; but I also try to look out for the
crop of beauty which grows on my trees and
vines. None but a poor man would be so
wasteful as to let that go unharvested.
Practical men are a little too ready to
assert that they are the only men who are




PRACTICAL MEN.           27 1
wide-awake. I stopped a business man in the
street of a certain town and inquired about
an author, and he told me that my man was
a dreamer.  I afterwards talked with a man
who was not cumbered with money, and he
told me that this writer of books was a simple man and without pride-a pleasant man
to talk with, and a lover of solitude.  There
is such a broad glare of daylight about some
men, that one may justly look forward toward
the night and dreams. I know that windows
of white glass are generally in vogue; but if
a man should have one window of stained
glass and only speak of what he sees through
that-what then? If he chooses to be silent
until he can see things in the haze of an
Indian summer- what then?
I find fault with practical men, they sometimes know so little about the use of things.
John Brown was a practical man who stood
ready to dash body and soul against incarnate
evil.  But was not that obscure man who
wrote "John Brown's soul is marching on,"
just as practical?  It may be that the guns
which Eli Whitney makes in his shops at the




272             FOOT NOTES.
foot of East Rock, are not half so potent as
this song which has been sung in the farmhouses, and in the camps, and in the streets
of conquered cities.
z~w5




XXXI.
SHE man who weighs hay on the
scales of Fairbanks in the village
street, is not the only one who does
weighing and gauging. No matter where I
walk, whether in a meadow  or in the town,
I am weighed over and over again. If men
don't weigh me, they look closely to see
what marks the weighers and gaugers in
my neighborhood have fixed on me. The farmer in Guilford who weighs his bales of
timothy with great steelyards hung from the
limbs of an elm tree before his house, answers
all my questions politely enough, but I go
away feeling as if he had measured me by
my fitness to be one of the selectmen or to
be put on the school-committee. I did not tell
him  that I had elected myself path-master
for all the roads.
When I go into the woods, the rabbits
leave their seats which they have hollowed
I8




274            FOO T NO TES.
out at the foot of the trees, and they hurry
off, showing their short tails, and a great deal
of white as they throw up their hinder parts.
At such times I imagine that I am measured
by my supposed appetite for meat; I feel as
if all the wild things of nature were'doing
me an injustice. Why should the woodchuck
think evil of me when my blood, like his
own, ebbs and flows with the rise and fall of
the sap in the oaks.  I have before now seen
a man weigh my coarse coat, thinking all the
while that he had weighed me. I now keep
one coat that is better than the other, and I
wear it when I choose to take a little of the
honor which is given to fine cloth and oilpaste blacking. But I have my revenge; for
I have appointed myself weigher and gauger,
and I am not going to shirk the business.
I am  always meeting a man and woman
riding together; and I am just as much amazed
to-day, when I consider how much men and
women travel together, as I was when I first
noticed the fact. In a rebel state I once met
a man and wife riding in compay; he rode on
the horse and drove, while she sat on the




WEIGHERS AND GA UGERS.       275
axletree of the cart and let her feet hang
down between the shafts. I have also seen a
man and woman lopping on the back seat of
a coach, and attended by a liveried driver and
footman. Whether they ride in cart or coach,
I always find that I am weighed, but it is the
woman who measures me, for often the man
does not see me at all. Shame-faced, or bold,
or proud, the young women manage to flash
one look at you which does the work. The
wives, sobered and chastened, give me looks
which tell of contentment, or resignation, or
dissatisfaction. I have inquired about this
scrutiny which I get from  the women, and
have found that I am constantly measured
with an eye to my fitness or unfitness for taking the place of a lover or a second husband.
I don't see why the wives should look at me
oftener than their husbands do.  Have they
not married the men of their choice?  Has
not every wife found that man who was born
and bred for her alone?
I am constantly reminded that love is everywhere the uppermost and undermost question.
I see love building houses and laying away




276            FO 0 T NOTES.
money for a rainy day, and making improvements for the children, which are the fruit of
love. Having walked into the tailor's shop,
and into the milliner's shop, I have learned
that both are places where business is done
in the interest. of love. I have seen a great
many girls come out in gay attire just as they
were bursting into womanhood; I have been
told that these fine clothes were worn on
account of their intrinsic beauty. But I have
done some thinking for myself, and I now
understand that nature has a conspiracy with
these girls to let me know  that they are
ready for love and a lover's uses.  I meet
many young women who are beautiful as
a peach-tree in bloom, who are as grand as
one of my old maples when the bees are
humming among the blossoms; the beauty of
these women makes them  "terrible as an
army with banners," and I feel an impulse to
walk on the other side of the road. However
I have never found any lack of men who are
brave enough to marry these girls and repeople the town.
From the day when I began walking until




WEIGHERS AiVD G4 UGERS.      277
this hour, I have noticed that the women
have a certain authority and power of service
in household matters, although they do not
own much of the real estate. I have been much
indebted to woman for her service, and I have
kept a girl to do some part of my work ever
since I have'been for myself. But work and
wages were not enough for her, so she has
left me and married a man who wanted to
give her love instead of money. I suppose I
might have married her, and thus have owned
her myself; but then she would have owned
me too, and I could no longer render a sort
of bachelor allegiance to all women. Moreover, I was not sure that marriage would be
just what it promises to be; she would
undoubtedly have promised to obey me, but
I should have found that in respect to her
dress she would obey all the rest of the
women rather than me; women are so gregarious. Besides she might have settled down
and become exceedingly devoted to me, forgetting that there are any other wants in the
world except those I have for meats and
drinks; and I might have intercepted much




278            FOOT NOTES.
of the love and honor which she should be
free to give to heaven and all decent men.
Being married to her I should have taken her
love as a matter of course, and thus have lost
my power of pleasing other women.  Mr.
Ravenstone says, "If you want to improve
the world, you must let all the women be
free to love the best men, and then make
every man win all the love he gets."
South-side banks dotted  with dandelions,
are good places for a man who has a job of
waiting to do; but when I go to the city, I
sometimes have to resort to the sunny side
of a meeting-house. Having done so once, a
well-dressed woman came along and walked
up and down before me as if she were a good
thing; she made an attack on me with her
eyes, though we had never been introduced
to each other. I am told that she peddles
her love in the street because marriage does
not provide for a great many people who are
hungry for love of one sort or- another.
I have seen an assemblage of husbands and
wives, and I have heard them call it society;
but I could see the fetters they all wore, and




WEIGHERS AND GA UGERS.        279
I missed that social enthusiasm which I shall
look for when I quit my little house to live
nearer the hearts of people. I have also been
in a barrack where there was a sergeant to
keep order; I sat on a rough bench to eat
bread and beef with the soldiers, and to drink
coffee from a tin cup that had rings around
its side to mark the half-pints. But the social
slush which the men gave one another in
camp, was not exactly the thing I wanted.
More or less of woman's love, is the confessed
or unconfessed want of every man I know of.
It does not seem honorable to be a bachelor
and prey on society; for children must be
taken care of. If the women owned all. the
real estate, it is barely possible that they
might get along, even if all the men should
become social vagabonds. However, I have
not yet been to that place where the women
do own all the property.
If we could have the truth for an orderly
sergeant and master of ceremonies, I should
be willing to help support the women, and then
leave them free to give their love to the most
worthy. I have no doubt but there would




.280           FOO T NOTES.
be a more substantial justice then than now,
when woman must either sell her love at
wholesale to a husband, or at retail to anyone else who can pay for it.




XXXII.
HAD  been to the city one spring
day, and had found very little that
was nourishing, though there was
no lack of hotels, nor of oranges in the shopwindows; but on my way home I came to
the Connecticut.  On the further side of it I
could see a rocky bank which was blackened
with pines and hemlocks and whitened by
water-gushes that had frozen on the cliffs.
Close to the surface of the river were two
wild ducks, flying slowly northward over the
open water and fields of ice.  The sight of
all these was so nourishing, I was led to conclude that I had found the nipple that was
meant for me.  At other times, when I have
visited the thickets where the box-turtles
creep with slow haste among skunk-cabbage
and white hellebore and crane's-bill and
sprouting fern-leaves which look like fiddle



282            FOOT NO TES.
heads, nature has opened her arms so widely
and given me such full fellowship and satisfaction, that I would feel no need of the love
which husbands get from their wives, or of
that applause we like to give a horseman,
when, putting his hand on the pommel, and
his left foot in the stirrup, he vaults lightly
into his saddle and goes off on an easy
canter.
At such times I hardly know whether it is
better to rejoice or to be alarmed at my
emancipation.  But such moods don't last
long: society reasserts itself soon enough.
I can see that I am a good deal indebted to
the generous-heartedness of the man who owns
the old pastures where I walk.  He could
any day drive away the poet, or dreamer, or
man of science from his field, and keep it for
his ewes and lambs, and for his bell-wether.
[ may walk much by myself, but nevertheless
I shall find that I am more concerned with
the hearts of men than with the state of the
roads or the prospects of the weather.  My
neighbor who disputes nine-tenths of my beiiefs, is after all a good deal nearer me than




HEARTS AND HEADS.           283
are the muskrats which dive into the river
and never stop to argue with me.
We build school-houses by the road-side,
and colleges on the hill-tops, half expecting
that the scholars and men of science are
going to do the great work; but 1 imagine
it will be found that the stout-hearted man
who believes in something, is the one who
does the most work, and keeps all things
going.  The heart is regnant.  I everywhere
hear men talking about what they think, and
I know they don't think at all; they are only
looking at things through their pure or impure hearts.  Most of the men I meet have
two creeds, according as their hearts are
filled with light or darkness.  The struggle
to have only one creed, is the thing which
makes a man's heart like a battle-field.
I meet hundreds of'simple men and women
who can neither foretell the weather nor
make an observation of the sun's altitude at
noon; and I inquire how are these people
going to steer their ships for this time and
the next: yet they go on from year to year
without. any apparent disaster, and I am




284            FOO 0 T NOTES.
forced to believe there is a wisdom of the
heart which acts by attraction and repulsion,
and which is wiser than all the science we
take so much pains to get.  These people
cohere in a mass to some thinker by means
of their hearts; the whole body is thus penetrated with thought of some sort, and society
is organized with more or less wisdom or
unwisdom; for the heart has its own processes. It sees and dogmatizes and carries
conviction without aid of syllogism or induction. Wise thinkers are valuable, no doubt,
but I don't think we need so many of them
as we- do of the wise lovers.
I hear a great many confessions that the
hearts of men are not just what they should
be; but for all that, I discover a tendency in
people to do justice to the men who are
gifted with tenderness.' Cash payment generally prevails, but we are all a little inclined
to let the good-hearted fellow pay his way
with his heart, just as we let other men pay
their way with their money. We take a little
less work from some folks because they are
kindly; and we go out of our ways to trade




HEARTS AND HEADS.           285
with a tender-hearted man, notwithstanding
he sells us prints which are out of date, or
makes us coats which are not quite up to
the style.  But these good fellows have hard
times enough; for they are either preyed
upon by selfish people, or else they are petted by their friends until they are too tender
to sleep in a bunk right manfully and eat
hard-tack in the furtherance of any great
cause.
I encounter men who are trying to get
along without hearts. They do a feeble business with their five senses and a sort of wit:
but they are only good Sodom-apples, full
of ashes within, and dry as a chestnut-rail.
I could get along with these men if they
would not come to my house to persuade me
that it is unwise to have beliefs, enthusiasms,
and hearts all ablaze.  In some places I find
asylums for idiots; in Meriden there is a
reform-school for boys who are weak in
morals; and at New Haven there is a college
with a faculty of fifty big heads to instruct
the young men who are expecting to do some
of the world's thinking by and by; but I




286           FOOT NOTES.
don't know of any college located hereabouts
with a faculty of fifty big hearts to help
these men who are troubled with imbecility
of the diaphragm.
In these times of rebellion I sometimes
suspect a man of carrying concealed weapons,
but I never have any doubt about the men
who go armed with hard hearts and who
give blows as with a slung-shot.  The presence of a hard man gives one a succession
of raps in the pit of the' stomach which are
as foul as a blow  aimed  below  the belt.
Krusty, who worked for Mr. Hokum  last
year, had a hard heart, and he seemed to fill
the atmosphere with airy fists which threatened to hit you.  He has gone away now,
and I once more find it pleasant to walk in
Mr. Hokum's pastures. But I paid him off
by granting him all the favors which he ever
asked for.  Having, in a few  cases, come
somewhat near to these hard men, I have
judged them to be tender-hearted people who
had been hurt by the touch of evil.  They
were sweet wines that had grown sour.
They might- perhaps, have been kept sweet,




HEARTS AND HEADS            287
if the right word had been spoken at some
time, or if the devil had never found a man
to speak the first wrong one. Some of them
are men who have had a ten years' battle
with an unwelcome truth, or who have gone
about with a wounded egotism, or with a
sense of wrong rankling in their hearts. There
is vast hope for a man who upbears the wrongs
he has seen or suffered, provided he keeps
sweet and does not harden his neighbors and
children.
There is no lack of hearts standing idle
like dry saw-mills; and I find not a fesw
others which are filled with dead loves, like
old houses that have their chambers and
garrets cluttered with broken things, and are
inhabited by people much concerned with old
clothes and linen stored in closets. I know
I ought to speak wisely on this matter; for
I am confident there is more than one man
who has some maniac passion which he keeps
chained in one corner of his house, and
which  shrieks and  roars when he would
invite his good angels.  He can entertain no
neighbors for fear they will smell the un



288            FOOT NO TES.
wholesomeness and hear the mutterings that
are in his home.  His, best hopes are that
the maniac is well chained and that the mad
thing will die at last.
I observe that most people are less anxious
to find a theory which will account for the
universe, than they are to get a little fire to
put into their bosoms; and I also notice
many people going up and down to do something for their hearts. Very simple men who
can not shine in a parlor just now, sometimes
tell me that their hearts ache because they
don't get such words as brothers and sisters
speak to one another.  The best I could do
for them was to praise God as the lover they
stood in need of. I once met a woman driving off to her home in a solitary farm-house.
The lines of her face impressed me that she
had borne her pain alone and had never told
what it was; and I was led to think that
husbands and wives are not always good
confessors for each other.  They are hardly
so well off as Edward St. Patrick, who tells
me that he goes to the confessional twice a
year and cures his heart.  Short-sighted men




HEARTS AN)D HEADS.         289
who fear evil go to the beer-shops; but I
have learned that thirst can only be quenched
by that stream of water which should flow
from a man's heart.  There are some ardent
men who go around telling people that social
life and many lovers are the things to cure
us all..  I have doubts of that; for I have
been abroad myself, and have stood where
I could see men and women who had been
ravaged by their lovers.
There are some people who are shy of
what they call the herd of men and women,
as if it were a shameful thing to let one's
heart beat in company with your neighbors,
or as if it were possible to call any heartthrob your own.  One man is not so very
different from all the rest.  When I see one
farmer planting his potatoes, I generally learn
that all the others are doing the same.  My
experience varies greatly according to the
company I am  in.  When 1 have lived in
societies where I had reason to believe that
the hearts of men were filled with mad swirls
of passion, I have had one experience. Here
in New England where men have often stood
I9




290            FOO0 T NO TES.
at the parting of the ways and in the forefront of the fight with Satan, where they have
walked among the abysses and along the
cliffs of hell, I have had an experience of
another sort.
I once went down to Patchogue, on Long
Island, and called at a house to get entertainment; but the powerful black-eyed housewife stood on her door-sill, and, looking at
my rough coat and knapsack, overwhelmed
me with the suspicions of her heart, saying,
"We don't know who to trust."  "Is t/at
so?" said I. The woman smiled a little, and
I concluded that'men just now stand in need
of some one in whom to trust. If there were
but one disinterested man, whom ve knew
to be such, his existence would be an infinite
hope and strength of heart for all men.  In
view of this need of our hearts, I now think
I understand why the powers of darkness are
so busy proving that Christ is less than he
claimed to be.




XXXIII.
HAVE before now said to myself,
"I will take my knapsack and follow
a straight line into the surrounding
spaces; I will conquer the world like the
peddler who sells his wares; I will smell the
odors of strange households; I will try the'
cooking of strange women; I will see how
each man colors the universal thought with
his own thought, and with what eyes he
looks at God. Men shall be as strange to me
as unnamed plants, and I will not come home
this night nor the next, but armed with
money I will throw myself on the hospitality
of farmers, charcoal-burners, and such men
as I may meet at night-fall."
A man who goes abroad in the morning
when the farmers are driving their teams
afield, and when the mechanics are going
shop-ward  with  their tin  pails, may find
everything harmonious and profitable, though




292            FOOT NOTES.
he comes home laden with things which can't
be sold to the grocers in State-street. But
let him cut loose from his own home as I
proposed, and go outside of his circle, and
he shall find that' society is not grooved for
him. The man and woman who live in that
out-of-the-way farm-house, surrounded by orchards, cider-mill and barn, did not go there
to keep an inn for you; they have crept away
from the throngs of people to live on love.'He is therefore a brave traveler who shall
dare to ask those lovers to quit their love
and entertain him for a night.
But an old tramp who has been over the
roads, understands well enough that society
follows up the lovers and imposes many labors on them  besides that of loving. Moreover, I have been in places where I could
overhear the confessions which husbands and
wives sometimes make, and I have been led
to surmise that the love in one of these solitary houses is not nearly enough for the men
and women who live there. I am  told by
those who have tried it, that this getting a
little aside from the world to love in pairs, is




WA YSIDE TA VERNS.        293
not after all just the thing that they had
supposed  it would  be.  And  their great
despair is, that they don't see what can be
done to help the matter; so they go to work
for the children, paint their fences, upholster
their houses, and do all they can to hide the
signs of their failure in the business of love.
I do not just now think of any situation
more  dismal unless it be that of Dainty
Selfishness, who failing to get the woman he
would have, goes off to his lonely house
with the woman he could have, and mopes.
However, if a man does not care to trust
himself to the inside of the houses which
stand on the roads where smart-grass and
May-weed grow, and where the old quincetrees overhang the garden walls, he may
walk in the dark until he finds one of the
men who keep
WAYSIDE TAVERNS.
1 do not propose to say anything about the
hotels which charge me for the use of sumptuous carpets and for the services of a prince
who has opened his palace to shelter the men




294            FOOT NOTES.
who can't go home every night. I shall only
speak of those roadside houses which are
somewhat remote from  the town, and which
are kept by half-farmer men who have found
that if a man shall stay at home and mind his
own business the world will come to see him
and he shall have a market for his hay and
potatoes, and for his doctrine.
I understand that men have always traveled
to Tyre and Sidon, but I find that they have
not always taken the same roads to get there.
I sometimes come to an old thoroughfare
where men surged back and forth long before
steam took the world's job of transportation.
I have great solitude when I travel on one of
these old roads; nevertheless, I feel as if I
were walking in a throng  of men, these
ancient highways are so grooved and rutted
by the men who have gone before me.
The old taverns on these roads are somewhat memorable. They have a desolation like
women who have mutely waited for the man
who will never come again. One might shelter himself in one of these old inns for weeks
and feel no lack of socQiety, they are so dense




WA YSIDE TA VERNS.         295
with the reminders of that rank stream of
human life which swept along the roads and
made eddies in bar-room and stable. But the
landlord has gone off with his bottles to keep
a hotel near the railways, and the ostler has
gone with his currycomb and brushes to pet
horses in other stables.
I once darted into the bar-room of an old
tavern to escape the rain. I saw long traces
of seed-corn hanging on the hooks which were
once occupied by the traveler's hat and overcoat.  Barrels of beans and other produce
were standing in the space behind the bar,
and in the corners of the room.  I saw no
one in that desolate place; but JI heard a
noise in the adjoining rooms, which made me
know that I was looked after by that hospitality which is one-half a desire to serve and
one-half a suspicion that I may not be able to
pay for what I get.
The small country store-keepers stop at the
old inns on their way back from town with a
load of boxes, barrels, bags of coffee, and,bunches of corn-brooms stuck into safe places,about the load. The farmers go there, and




296            FOOT NOTES.
they ruck up the flaps of their long blue
frocks when they want to get at their wallets
to pay their reckoning. When I have stopped
to drink beer at an old tavern I would seem
to have a taste of all the drams which had
been drunk there for fifty years, and I would
feel as if I had joined the revelers and
indorsed their excesses, the associations of
the place were so mingled with my draught.
My tavern was an inn as long ago as when
my grandfather went there in the times when
men wore knee-breeches and stockings with
clocks at the ankles, and its rooms smell as
if much foul speech and many stale jokes had
stuck in its walls. My landlord, who holds
himself aloof, assures me that water ought to
be weak enough for a man who don't want
strong drink. A feeble-minded old man who
eats at the second table and builds fires, does
the hospitality of the establishment by making
speech with me; I suppose he takes his pay
in the odds and ends of social heat which he
gets from comers and goers. Ancient oaks
stand about my inn; and there is an elm  the,trunk.of which 1 can't measure with my arms




WA YSIDE TA VERNS.         297
thrice outstretched. These trees give some
majesty to the rotting house and stables, and
I -conclude that men have been proud to say
that they had dined at the Great Elm. The
grass is no longer worn away by the teams
and by the stage which stopped at the door
while the passengers refreshed themselves at
the bar, and while the driver and ostler mingled their words,-the one covered with the
dust of the road, and the other perfumed with
the ammonia of the stables.
The dense earthiness of the* landlord provokes reflection. He is a perpetual utterance
that eating is a good act, and that it is well
to be a hearty animal. He is no reformer;
the world is well enough as it is, and he will
take it as he found it. Why should he have
spirituality and mentality to rebuke me when
I am  eager and hungry. He has met none
but hungry and weary men for years, and
who shall dare to blame him if he does look
upon men as animals which, having fine tastes,
require to be stabled in the house, with fine
linen between their bodies and the straw.
Deacon Collins some years ago bought a farm




298            FO00T NOTES.
with a tavern on it. Being a gloomy man he
found it hard work to keep a roadside inn.
So he cut off the top of his sign-post and.
used the bottom as a hitching-place for his
own horse.  After that he found it easy to
devote himself to reform and to the gospel of
universal smash according to Miller.
Notwithstanding these old taverns have an
inner sphere in which the women live, and
notwithstanding the men in these places sit at
table with the women and eat woman's cookery,
using knives and forks instead of their fingers,
the society of the bar-room  is, I find, not
unlike that in camps and all other places
where men live much by themselves. It is a
rude animal life in the houses which are kept
open for me when I get outside of my circle.
There is so much of this society while I
have so little need of it, I have sometimes
been led to pick flaws in the management of
the universe. But I am learning to look at
things a little more closely, as with one eye
shut, and I have concluded that God has not
limited his likes and dislikes by my constitution. I imagine he has very tolerant feelings




WA YSIDE TA VERNS.        299
toward good, strong animal life which makes
easy work of eating and breeding.  Were it
not so I think it would go hard with the
skunks and woodchucks. For all that I imagine God likes some things better than others.
I have staid at home and wrought in Illy
garden, stopping once in a while to note the
manner in which rebellions are quenched, for
it is a part of my business to see how the
work of this world is to be done and who is
to do it, and I have observed that God has
picked the cheapest men he could to die for
the country, and that he has saved the best
he could to live for it.
A wayside tavern is a cheap place for a
man who does not want to talk. None but a
very rich man can pay his way with his
speech. Paying one's way with his ideas is
not much practiced, except in the higher circles of life. Our thought is so sectional but
very little of it will pass outside of our own
states; it is not yet nationalized. Besides, the
demand for bread-stuffs and meat is so overbearing, you shall go far before you find a
man who will prefer your thought to his meat




300            FOOT NOTES.
and potatoes. Most men are too poor to pay
their bills in this way, and therefore we beg
to be let alone and to be suffered to go to
an inn where the landlord is satisfied with
our money.
The man who took me for a peddler and
cursed me, is not the only one who has
given me an impression of God.  You may
wait on the outskirts of a crowd and watch
for the image of God which is reflected from
the minds of each man, and if tolerant
enough you shall find it more pleasant than
looking at the bits of colored light, green,
yellow and red, which are cast back by the
drops of rain frozen on the trees; you shall
find it grander than gazing at the large red
moon when it comes up from the sea and
makes a bridge of light across the  dark
waters of the bay.
But all these second-hand views of God
are just a little distorted, I imagine, like the
image of things seen in turbid or troubled
waters.  Men talk of God in my hearing,
but I notice that they are looking at him




GOD.                 301
through some ideal, or earthiness, some aspiration or limitation of their own, and when I
have heard a man's idea of God I have
imagined Him to be like the man who was
talking.  When I walk with the geologist I
perceive that God is a wonderful stonebreaker, and when I go afield with the
botanists,.I perceive that He is a masterflorist.  I am  amazed at the swork He has
done to -get the forest well clothed with
leaves, the grass well sprouted, and all the
buds for next year set in their right places;
I must'not therefore conclude that God is
too busy to look after me,-I must feel more
sure that I shall be well cared for.
This man speaks and I perceive that God
is a great builder, that He  has infinite
patience and is master of the situation. The
other man is looking for a God who can disregard the multiplication-table at any point
in His calculations.  Thus I don't wonder
that men sometimes appear a little atheistical
to one another, and that they are intolerant
toward one another's gods.  I once heard a
man speaking of God's management as if He




302            FOOT NO TES.
were a great experimenter, a being full of
expedients and make-shifts, and who had to
work hard to beat the devil and make both
ends meet.  Intolerance welled up in my
heart and I wanted to say, "I don't believe
God is any such tinker as that; I believe He
is full of resources and knows how to do a
good job."  I am now looking for the man
who has cleansed his eyes and who can show
me a great deal more of God than he does
of himself.




XXXIV.
WAS  arrested  once in a western
town.  I should  perhaps say detained, for the officer of the law did
not come to me with a formal essay written
by a justice of the peace.  The thing happened in this wise; I had sold goods in that
place, and was waiting for means to leave. I
felt serene, for I had in the way of barter
become the owner of a shop-worn copy of
"Irving's Life of Goldsmith."  The latter
person, it appears, was at one time something of a vagabond-walker; but he afterward
wrote his name in big letters for the world
to look at, though he never really got the
knack of paying his debts.  With all his
genius, I imagine he could never have been
taught to manage a farm  like Mr. Hokum..
While waiting there I felt a slight touch
between my shoulders, as with the end of a
finger.  On  looking up I saw  a man in




304            FOO T NO TES.
butternut-colored clothes; he was smoking
placidly, almost dreamily, and he said that
he had a small account against me for having
sold goods in his city without a license. The
man's act was graceful, for it was power
acting freely, and it did not take me long to
see that I was arrested by the town, and by
the county, state and Union, if the matter
should go as far as that.
I have been arrested a great many times
since I began doing business in the meadows
and pastures, but I do not always learn at
once for what I am detained. Mother Saint
Martin's meadow  stopped me more than a
year ago with a touch more gentle than that
of the politest marshal.  Since then I have
hung around that field to find what it wanted
of me; I have crossed it on my way to
other places; I have. gone to it on purpose.
I knew  that Mother Saint Martin wore a
man's coat and hat, that she quenched her
thirst with things stronger than tea, and that
she had her work done by vagabond men:
nevertheless, she has always made me feel
as if she were regnant in her sphere; she has




UNDER ARREST            305
given -me such piercing looks when I have
passed her house, and looked into her yard.
I also knew that the Saint Martins had given the country one bishop whose name has
found a place in the Cyclopedia, and who
some years ago slid down from episcopacy into
papacy.
I think I notice some tendency for people
to fall back into primitive forms of religion,
just as my seedling grapes show a disposition
to be like the wild ones along the Quinnipiac. I
often get a taste of paganism in my books, and
I have myself been near enough to it to feel
its heat and light, and to understand how people might undertake to live and die by some
form of paganism and perhaps feel intolerant
toward those who chose to live and die by
other creeds.
I had seen a man lying dead on the floor of
Mother Saint Martin's barn where he had died
in the night.  Strange men were standing
around to perform the last formalities of the
law, and a man of the vagabond class was
hovering over the dead body with that jealous
watchfulness which outcast men feel in the
20




396            FOOT NO TES.
presence of those who own the houses and
land. The thought of all these things may
have put a charm on my eyes, but nevertheless, it was not the glamour of the old lady's
home that had thus detained me in her
meadow.
I have walked in many a meadow, but
Mother Saint Martin's has had the most to
do with me; I will, therefore, speak of it with
some degree of minuteness.
This meadow lies at the foot of a wooded
slope; from it I look in one direction across
rye-fields and dry fields, and other meadows
till I see Mt. Beseck. In another direction I
see spire and tower, flag-staff and cupola,
clustered together and lifted above the trees.
It is watered by a small brook which creeps
out from beneath low hanging trees, as from
behind a curtain put there to hide the mouth
of the ravine which has been worn into the
sandstone, and which in these days holds a
gloom  flecked with sunshine.  Mr. Hokum
shares this brook with' the old lady, and in
the spring-time he makes a dam with sticks
and dead leaves to direct his half of the




UNDER ARREST.            307
water into the gutters which  irrigate his
meadow. Much skunk-cabbage grows there
in the spring; later there are painted-cups
and iris; and now there are lilies and meadow
rue, buttercups and clover-heads, and tall
ferns mixed with wild grasses. In one place
there is a patch of herds-grass swayed over
by its own weight; in another there is a
thicket composed of an ash tree, a sumac, an
elm, a dogwood bush, a bitter-sweet and
a grape-vine.  Sweet cicely grows in the
corners of the fence; it has a gentle domesticity like a man who remains fragrant and
loving though he walk in solitude, and it has
no need of going to the gardens to get
refinement. Ancient apple-trees, with trunks
overgrown with poison-ivy, stand everywhere,
and there are young ones which have sprung
up from  the seeds left in the ordure of the
cattle that eat the rowen and browse the
trees. Mother Saint Martin comes hither in
the spring to get pot-herbs. Rude men who
keep their inspiration in bottles make the
hay, and in the fall they come to get the apples
for cider. I know that this old meadow has




3 o08          FOO 0 T NO TES.
little to distinguish it from any other meadow,
unless it be the fences which surround it;
and I also know that it yields more weeds
and less grass than the adjoining lot which
Mr. Hokum  has bought from  some one of
the Saint Martins. Yet like some people who
can say much because they have done little,
this meadow finally opened its mind to me
one day last spring when the turf was sprouting and when the apple-trees were in bloom,
and I will report what4t said about
GRASS.
"All flesh is grass," says an ancient Hebrew,
and I accept his dogma, though I have no
reason to believe that he was looking at the
meadows with the eye of a botanist, or that
he knew  the value of the great family of
grasses. If a man will take pains to look at
things just as they are, he will find that grass
is king in most places. Western wheat, the
Scotchman's oats, and  the  rye on which
shrewd Connecticut men feed; the rice of India,
and the wild rice of Minnesota; the barley
which temperance men raise and sell to the




GRASS.               309
brewers; Cuban sugar-cane and corn, and the
bamboo of China; all these are grasses, and
brothers to Mr. Hokum's red-top and timothy,
and the bog-grass which stands on a tussuck.
There are not many places in which this family
is not at work, either with head or body.
Indeed, grass lies at the very bottom  of all
the affairs of men; and we may look for much
confusion if Grass should ever shirk from his
job of governing the world.
To me bread and butter, beef and wool, are
nothing but forms of grass.  He who uses
these should know that he, too, is a consumer
of grass.  Men who reflect but very little
often seem to have such glimpses of the truth
about grass, as we'always get when we stand
too near a thing; and they talk of their bread
and butter as if these were the symbols and
sum totals of all business.  A  man shall not
build houses, buy pictures, and read poems,
until he has more grass than he can use, and
until he is able to feed the architect and
the painter and the poet. Whoever can help
King Grass, may therefore hope to hasten the
millennium.




3I0 FOO T NOTES.
An old meadow that keeps apple-trees, may
stand for the central bureau and office of
nature, the court of the world; for grass is
king, and the wild-rose is queen, since the
apple and pear, peach and plum, raspberry,
blackberry,. strawberry and quince, too, all belong to her family. The farmer is the most
loyal of men; for he resolutely digs up burdock and daisy to make room for his grass.
When cotton undertook to be king, the loyal
grass-growers mowed away the rebellion with
one-tined forks, like a stout man on a hay-mow.
But I shall be as loyal as the farmers, and
more gallant, too: for I will serve Queen
Rose one half the time.




XXXV.! —LTtHOUGH  nature has wooed me in
forest and meadow, I have not become her devout worshiper, for I
know her to be as stern a dame as any man
ever had for a mother. She would freeze me
as quickly as she would a beggar, and she
would freeze a beggar as quickly as she would
a carrot. I have praised her with my speech,
but -for all that she will never hesitate to use
my tongue to feed her grasses. She puts a
little wit into our heads, and then tells us to
go where we please, but be sure to keep out
of the way when she is at work. I must not
swim in the sea when the mad waves are
fretting and booming against the rocks on
Webb's island; I can not play with the river
when it leaps over the ledges; and I dare not
be near the lightning when it rips a long
splinter from a hemlock tree. In view of this




3T 2          FOO 0T NOTES.
harshness of nature I once fell into a profound
melancholy, and all gospels seemed inadequate.'Had I not learned how to love my
limitations, I might have become a cynic and
snarled at hail and frost.
I have never yet talked with a man who
has not had his clinch with the universe; and
my wonder is that our cynicism is so mild.
The men of the World tell me they don't believe that any man can be happy; but I find
they are all waiting for me to applaud them
for having made so great a discovery. The
men of the church say that we are all sinners;
nevertheless I have learned that the church is
too narrow for any man who claims to have
a pure conscience. The best men that I know
see more evil than I do, but hope keeps them
sweet, and they watch the thought of the
world for the signs of the good time coming.
When I walk in the winter time, I find
nature somewhat agaihst me, but 1 have
dropped mny quarrel with her; therefore I have
hope, and always keep an eye out for




SIGNS OF' SPRING.
TIHE SIGNS OF SPRING.
Sugar-makers wading in the snow,
Scattering their buckets as they go.
Sap of maple glinting on the spout,
Smoke of camp-fire, and the wood-man's shout.
Melted snows upon the tarns;
Eggs and cacklings in the barns;
Cawing crows among the oaks;
Marshes muttering twilight croaks;
Day-god mounting high and higher,
Giving light more mixed with fire.
Hand-grips mystic and masonic;
Love that's growing less Platonic.
Sunny banks all brown with leaves;
Farmers chopping in their sleeves;
Life has come, and hellebore;
Faith is up —despair is o'er.
Being in a mood somewhat earnest; I once
felt an impulse to stop a man in the road
and ask him if he had brought any news
from  God.  But seeing the  humor of my




314            FOOT NOTES.
situation, I took care to strangle the question
that was rising to my mouth.
I now think it would not be well for a
sane man to go into the street to ask such
questions, unless, perchance, he dares to be
laughed at, or unless he wants to see men
shrink away from him as from a satirical
humorist who has no sympathy for their
hunger and darkness.  Let him  wait till
spring, instead, and then ask the budding
year if it brings any good news from God.
The coming of spring is of vast moment
in the agricultural districts, and to the northern lumbermen and fishermen who are waiting
for the streams to break up.  Its chief value
with me, however, lies in the fact that it
brings the report, or rather confirms the old
report, that God is well, and that the universe is just as sound as ever.  The sun
whirling upward toward its summer place,
the fields and streams cleared promptly for
action, the grass sprouting up with all its
ancient power and freshness, all these show
an unabated vigor-show  that God is not
getting feeble.  Indeed, there are signs that




GOD3 IS WELL.              315
things in general are gaining somewhat in
health.  There are new  houses building  on
the sites of the old ones; the towns are
spreading a little; and in some places there
is more clover than before; and, methinks,
there is more hope and power in the hearts
of those who are trusting Christ to link them
to a God who never fails, and to a universe
that is in no danger of bankruptcy.
God is well: therefore the universe is
sound at the core.  Here is a fact, if well
looked  at, that shall heal your  maladies.
Hang it up in your memory where \it will
keep green like a sprig of live-forever that is
stuck in the crack of a ceiling.
Iterate, reiterate,
Snatch it from the hells;
Circulate and meditate
That God is well.
Get the singers to sing it,
Put it in the mouths of bells,
Pay the ringers to ring it,
That God is well.




XXXVI.
AM amazed when I stop to observe
the amount of fellowship which exists
_ between men and brutes. On one
occasion I asked a boy of the lower class
which he loved best, brother James or brother
dog. He said he loved his brother James
best; -but for all that his dog fellowship.was
uppermost. I stepped aside once to let a man
and woman dash past me. They and the
carriage appeared as if penetrated with the
fiery spirit of the coal-black horse, and I
thought I should not like to marry a horsewoman fcr fear my boy might have an arched
neck and a mane instead of a beard. When I
have looked into some of the dark corners of
human experience, I have found brute life
holding people with a power almost equal to
anything I had ever expected from mankind
or womankind. This love between man and




FELL 0 WSHIP.          317
beast has already claimed a place in our
books. There is a literary woman just outside of my walking-place, who lets her desolate
heroine find comfort in the love of a cow;
and I read that horse-talk is common language
for all such gentlemen as the world has been
able to show.
I had supposed that the brute was the
lowest form of life which could impress me,
but my later walks have led me to conclude
that the wild plants have a life in them which
yearns for me with a mute strength that goes
beyond the deepest-hearted woman who ever
loved in silence. I was impelled once to put
my hand on the trunk of a tree in some such
manner as one puts his palm on the shoulder
of a man he knows. When I have for a time
left everything behind me, and walked alone
on the more solitary parts of Wallingford
plain in order to look at the toad-flax, hopclover and shrub-oaks, I have felt the life of
the plants, and I have found that they had
something to give in return for my attention.
I know that the nature which I go to see is
a sort of humanized nature, for there is not a




318            FOOT NOTES.
rood of land in Wallingford that has not some
hint of man. It is like an Indian who has
washed the green paint from his face, and who
has bought his clothes at the tailor's, but who
nevertheless hunts and loafs and gives a wild
whoop. Tame as it may be, the spirit which
dwells in a meadow is that of nature, and its
properties become more real when I contrast
it with the subtle element'I enter as soon as
I leave the fields and walk into a town to
see the
OLD SHADE TREES.
I don't have to go into a thicket every time
I wish to get a taste of nature; I can often
find it around the habitations of men. I find
men who are doing their work as simply and
unconsciously as a beaver at his dam, and
who never stop to look over their shoulders
to see about your applause or mine. It may
be that we are in the habit of making a distinction between men and nature somewhat
too hastily. Therefore I shall not speak of
the trees which have been planted by men
who have just awaked to a consciousness of




OLD SHADE TREES.          3I9
art, who fill their gardens with a strange
jumble of trees and shrubs, and then hope
they have done something artistic and natural;
neither will I speak of those which have been
planted by. men whose lives had become
artistic, and who know how to deck their
homes with a little of that sweet confusion
which reigns in some old pasture. I shall
only speak of those trees which have been
cared for by simple men who planted chiefly
for shade, and thought as little of effect as
the woodchuck which digs its hole between
a choke-cherry and a shrub-oak. I have in
mind great lichen-stained elms which stand in
the road, and which lay hold of the ground
with half-naked roots that hint at power more
decidedly than a lion-footed chair-of-state. I
have in mind the four maples set in a row
between the house and road, which chafe the
cornices and rub the moss away from spots
on the shingles. 1 have also in mind those
trees which give me glimpses of old gables
and broken chimney-tops, and those which
stand near the well in a back yard, where
tired men and boys wash themselves in a
skillet on a bench.




320           SFOOT NOTES.
It matters little whether these simple men
have planted wisely or not, for time and nature are charitable; they often find a way to
complete the work of unskillful men. When
I have come out on some new road, I have
sometimes been arrested by the dignity which
was given to the farm-houses by the oaks
and elms which stretch their arms over my
path, and I would again imagine that I had
come to a people who expressed themselves
through the arts, and who were bred to take
command in our great emergencies. I would
think that my speech ought to be furbished,
like the words in a book.  But I found that
those men and women had muscles well seasoned with work, and that their hands and
arms were not like those of an artist.  I
afterwards concluded that literature is always
open to such people, for the mind keeps
limber somewhat longer than the body, and
a man may hope to write prose and verse,
though he clothes them in crabbed letters.
Considering that our Puritan ancestors
came from among English oaks, I sometimes
ask why they did not plant more of our




OLD SHADE TREES.          3 2 1
native oaks about their old homesteads. But
I can only answer the question by applauding
them  for a resolute purpose to leave old
things behind, and to be contented with what
was newest, most native and near at hand.
It may be that the latent Yankee which existed in the Puritan, at once seized upon the
stately and graceful elm as something more
like himself than are the sturdy white oaks.
However, I suppose the Puritans' science was
too weak to deal with our oaks; therefore
they let them alone just as we do some people
who work best when left to themselves, and
they made use of. the more pliant elms and
maples. Consequently it often happens that a
man's pasture has more dignity than his
home.
I concern myself with the origin and history of some of the trees I find. I have put
loud questions into the ears of an old man,
and 1 have learned how small his great elm
had once been. I have seen a farmer coming
in from the thickets with a young tree on his
back. Having had a smell of the woods, he
had stolen back with ax and spade to get a
2!




322            FOOT NOTES.
morsel to put into some corner about his
dwelling. One day last spring, I came to a
house where a young tree had been planted;
I said, "It is good to know how these old
elms made a beginning."
The house is small, and stands where three
roads meet; on one side is.the garden, with
flowers and grape-trellises; the back yard has
a row of bee-hives and a wood-pile; the
barns are on another side, and they speak of
a thorough farmer. The man must have felt
that his place lacked dignity, and so planted
an elm on the three-cornered plat made by
the meeting of the roads.  It is a sturdy
young tree which three men could scarcely
bring from the woods. The man has planted
truthfully, for he cut off the top just at the
base of the lowest branches, and he brought
long rye straw from the barn to put about
the roots; an old-time man would have planted
a few potatoes with his tree to draw  the
moisture.  The tree has made many dark
leaves, and promises to preside over house
and barn, and overlook rye-fields and cornfields.




OLD SHADE TREES.          323
I have myself helped at the setting of elms,
and I have learned something about -the men
who planted our oldest trees. The man who
planted the poplars, was in a hurry for something to grow; he did not stop long to live
in the shadow he had made, but went elsewhere to plant again.  The maples were
planted by a man who liked their feminine
dignity and freshness and who always acted
as if he thought the second best was good
enough. He who planted the mazzard cherrytree for shade was a very practical man, who
looked well to the use of a thing; but to
him usefulness meant just about the same as
good to eat. He was too practical, and his
boys would never have come to much had
they not taken some love of beauty from
their mother. Beauty is one of the working
forces, I understand: it gives a spring to
genius, and adds politeness to our morals.
The man who set out pine trees did a very
small business in that line, but he was a cheerful fellow and could sing dirges to his
children for a lullaby, and not be melancholy.




XXXVI I
THINK  I know the value of society
as well as any man does, and thereftore
I have no objection to looking at
things with such eyes as my neighbor and 1
can agree on, for he has as much interest
in clear-seeing as I.  But there are times
when it is good for a man to walk alone;
nature has her privacies, and won't reveal
them to you nor to me when others are listening.  It is for this reason that a man should
divest himself of every rag which society has
put on him, and bask in the presence of
nature, like boys lounging naked on the warm
river-beaches to hunt for the eggs which the
turtles have hidden in the sand. I have been
as eager to seek the crowd of men and women
as any man could be after his own work was
done, and I have not always been slow  to
look at things through other men's eye-holes.




SOcIE T.              325
The gathering-places of men have attracted
me like magnets.  The sight of a village
spire and strange chimneys allures me with
a promise of heat which does not come from
stoves, and of light which does not come from
lamps.  Thus inspired I can walk in many
directions.  I have visited college towns on
Commencement day where I could see the
young thinkers cutting their milk-teeth on
certain tough old names, like Cato, Zeno,
Aristophanes and Pindar, -themes which are
mostly kept in those towns, and which serve
for generation after generation, they have
such durability in spite of frequent use.  In
other places India-rubber rings are used by
the little folk who are preparing to chew
everything which comes to them. Agrimony
seems to me a fresher theme just now than
any of those old names; I fancy that trochee
after trochee may yet come and cluster about
that word until a poem is made.  Of all the
young men who stand up in dress-coats and
white vests to address me when 1 go to a
college town, he who has studied best has
the honor of delivering the valedictory. But




326            FOOT NOTES.
the roses are thrown at him who has made
the most friends among the women in the
gallery.
I know there are men of culture outside of
my circle who have walked more than 1, but
I don't know of any one within it.  I have
therefore, dear reader, appointed myself to
speak some last words at
THE FORK IN OUR ROAD.
A man should not be always walking and
looking; his eyes and legs are not the whole
of him.  My people have long had the habit
of stopping when their work was done, and
I find that it is good to sit down and shut
one's eyes in order to watch for the things
that are near at home. If a man can not do
this for days and years, nothing shall go well
with him. I am made weary when I go
among men, I meet so many of them who
are always walking toward shop or field, or
who are always so earnestly, almost madly,
at work, as if under some crushing necessity
that will never let them  stop.  I hear men
glorying over our railways and telegraphs,




THE FORK IN OUR ROAD.        327
our sewing-machines and mowing-machines,
and in our great patent office which is
intended to protect the men who invent
machines to save work.  I know we all eat
more and drink more, wear more and tear
more, in consequence of these great inventions, but I am  constrained to ask, When is
the world going to learn how to use more
leisure?  Many of us have walked so far now
that we wear our leisure as awkwardly as
Edward St. Patrick does his best coat and
hat. If a man does not walk to enter into
rest, he had better stay at home.
I have not spoken to you in the language
of the shop or farm, neither have I used such
words as I speak in my garden. I have been
speaking from my privacy to you in your
privacy. If a man wants me to listen, let
him address his most private thought to what
is innermost in me. Hand shaking and talk
about the weather may do for people who
live far apart, and who can get no nearer by
never so much walking. I may be charged
with walking in every direction. But I can
only say that I often travel both ways on the




328            FOOT NOTES.
same road: I come and I go. A  man who
has no home, can walk in a straight line and
make a show  of consistency, for he comes
from no town and is going to nowhere. A
man who has a certain abiding place, may
seem to. be teaming in many directions, but
if you watch him closely you shall find where
he lives.
You who have watched me doubtless know
my gait. You have seen me set forth in the
morning crank and triumphant, and you have
seen me come home at night: you have seen
me falling back on my reserved strength like
a horseman who saves his beast for a final
dash through the town; and you have seen
me walking like the vagabond who raises a
small cloud of dust, and gives many a hitch to
shift the burden of his pack as he goes up
the road. I may have done more than my
share of fault-finding; but T have not refused
to be comforted, like the old tramp who
would not stop to eat cold victuals and tell
his story, and who fired sulphurous words
backward over his shoulder as he went down
the road, his wooden leg squeaking, and
thumping the ground with angry emphasis.




THE FORK IN OUR- ROAD.       329
I am told that my words prove nothing.
The beauty of some men's work is that they
do not try to prove anything. I have to dowith things that are evident. My business
has been to walk and see. I have great respect for the man who never travels on any
road except the one which leads from premise
to conclusion; nevertheless I am looking for
that man who is able to uncover things so
that I can see them. If put to it, I might have
some difficulty in proving my own existence.
But when I take myself for granted I get
along well enough. At present I am not engaged in drawing conclusions. That is a
business which I leave to the heavy teams.
I am a fact, and, therefore, I have given you
a great deal of myself. I have vast respect
for facts, and I have greatamazement when I
consider with how few of them most people
manage to get along. Who can say that he
has ever unearthed any important fact? I
don't think I have ever seen a dozen men who
have each discovered one great fact. It is
a big thing to discover a fact. It is the
work of all a man's senses, together with his




330            F7OO  ANOTES.
imagination and the gift of prophecy, 1 judge.
I am aware that mny speech has been like
the tooting which boys make on the stems of
dandelions when they are at play in the
meadows. To those people who have found
my words flavorous like mustard or soothing
like poppy-juice, and to those men who have
gone out of their way to hear my dandelion,
to these I can only say that I can guess the
value of the bouquets which society likes to
throw at the folk who please it; for I have
myself thrown many a bunch of poke and
mullein at my readers.