proposition, cunningly to tickle my individual vanity beneath it,
such misconception must vanish upon my frankly conceding, that
land adjoining my alder swamp was sold last month for ten dollars
an acre, and thought a rash purchase at that; so that for wide
houses hereabouts there is plenty of room, and cheap. Indeed so
cheap--dirt cheap--is the soil, that our elms thrust out their
roots in it, and hang their great boughs over it, in the most
lavish and reckless way. Almost all our crops, too, are sown
broadcast, even peas and turnips. A farmer among us, who should
go about his twenty-acre field, poking his finger into it here
and there, and dropping down a mustard seed, would be thought a
penurious, narrow-minded husbandman. The dandelions in the
river-meadows, and the forget-me-nots along the mountain roads,
you see at once they are put to no economy in space. Some
seasons, too, our rye comes up here and there a spear, sole and
single like a church-spire. It doesn't care to crowd itself where
it knows there is such a deal of room. The world is wide, the
world is all before us, says the rye. Weeds, too, it is amazing
how they spread. No such thing as arresting them--some of our
pastures being a sort of Alsatia for the weeds. As for the grass,
every spring it is like Kossuth's rising of what he calls the
peoples. Mountains, too, a regular camp-meeting of them. For the
same reason, the same all-sufficiency of room, our shadows march
and countermarch, going through their various drills and masterly
evolutions, like the old imperial guard on the Champs de Mars.
As for the hills, especially where the roads cross them the
supervisors of our various towns have given notice to all
concerned, that they can come and dig them down and cart them
off, and never a cent to pay, no more than for the privilege of
picking blackberries. The stranger who is buried here, what