so seasoned by morning dews as to be like wood for hardness. These
were to keep his feet protected from briers or from the bees
scattered upon the wild white clover or from the terrible hidden
thorns of the honey-locust. No socks. A pair of scant homespun
trousers, long outgrown. A coarse clean shirt. His big shock-head
thatched with yellow straw, a dilapidated sun-and-rain shed.

The lanky young giant cut and cut and cut: great purple-bodied
poke, strung with crimson-juiced seed; great burdock, its green
burrs a plague; great milkweed, its creamy sap gushing at every
gash; great thistles, thousand-nettled; great ironweed, plumed with
royal purple; now and then a straggling bramble prone with velvety
berries--the outpost of a patch behind him; now and then--more
carefully, lest he notch his blade--low sprouts of wild cane,
survivals of the impenetrable brakes of pioneer days. All these and
more, the rank, mighty measure of the soil's fertility--low down.

Measure of its fertility aloft, the tops of the trees, from which
the call of the red-headed woodpecker sounded as faint as the
memory of a sound and the bark of the squirrels was elfin-thin. A
hot crowded land, crammed with undergrowth and overgrowth wherever
a woodland stood; and around every woodland dense cornfields; or,
denser still, the leagues of swaying hemp. The smell of this now
lay heavy on the air, seeming to be dragged hither and thither like
a slow scum on the breeze, like a moss on a sluggish pond. A deep
robust land; and among its growths he--this lad, in his way a
self-unconscious human weed, the seed of his kind borne in from far
some generations back, but springing out of the soil naturally now,
sap of its sap, strength of its strength.