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Walking by Henry David Thoreau
page 26 of 43 (60%)
soil," and that "agriculture here already assumes proportions
unknown everywhere else." I think that the farmer displaces the
Indian even because he redeems the meadow, and so makes himself
stronger and in some respects more natural. I was surveying for a
man the other day a single straight line one hundred and
thirty-two rods long, through a swamp at whose entrance might
have been written the words which Dante read over the entrance to
the infernal regions,--"Leave all hope, ye that enter"--that is,
of ever getting out again; where at one time I saw my employer
actually up to his neck and swimming for his life in his
property, though it was still winter. He had another similar
swamp which I could not survey at all, because it was completely
under water, and nevertheless, with regard to a third swamp,
which I did SURVEY from a distance, he remarked to me, true to
his instincts, that he would not part with it for any
consideration, on account of the mud which it contained. And that
man intends to put a girdling ditch round the whole in the course
of forty months, and so redeem it by the magic of his spade. I
refer to him only as the type of a class.

The weapons with which we have gained our most important
victories, which should be handed down as heirlooms from father
to son, are not the sword and the lance, but the bushwhack, the
turf-cutter, the spade, and the bog hoe, rusted with the blood of
many a meadow, and begrimed with the dust of many a hard-fought
field. The very winds blew the Indian's cornfield into the
meadow, and pointed out the way which he had not the skill to
follow. He had no better implement with which to intrench himself
in the land than a clam-shell. But the farmer is armed with plow
and spade.
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