fences and let the forest stand! I saw the fences half consumed,
their ends lost in the middle of the prairie, and some worldly
miser with a surveyor looking after his bounds, while heaven had
taken place around him, and he did not see the angels going to
and fro, but was looking for an old post-hole in the midst of
paradise. I looked again, and saw him standing in the middle of a
boggy Stygian fen, surrounded by devils, and he had found his
bounds without a doubt, three little stones, where a stake had
been driven, and looking nearer, I saw that the Prince of
Darkness was his surveyor.

I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles,
commencing at my own door, without going by any house, without
crossing a road except where the fox and the mink do: first along
by the river, and then the brook, and then the meadow and the
woodside. There are square miles in my vicinity which have no
inhabitant. From many a hill I can see civilization and the
abodes of man afar. The farmers and their works are scarcely more
obvious than woodchucks and their burrows. Man and his affairs,
church and state and school, trade and commerce, and manufactures
and agriculture even politics, the most alarming of them all--I
am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the landscape.
Politics is but a narrow field, and that still narrower highway
yonder leads to it. I sometimes direct the traveler thither. If
you would go to the political world, follow the great
road--follow that market-man, keep his dust in your eyes, and it
will lead you straight to it; for it, too, has its place merely,
and does not occupy all space. I pass from it as from a bean
field into the forest, and it is forgotten. In one half-hour I
can walk off to some portion of the earth's surface where a man