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
traveller 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 does not stand from one year's end to
another, and there, consequently, politics are not, for they are but as
the cigar-smoke of a man.

The village is the place to which the roads tend, a sort of expansion of
the highway, as a lake of a river. It is the body of which roads are the
arms and legs,--a trivial or quadrivial place, the thoroughfare and
ordinary of travellers. The word is from the Latin _villa_, which,
together with _via_, a way, or more anciently _ved_ and _vella_, Varro
derives from _veho_, to carry, because the villa is the place to and from
which things are carried. They who got their living by teaming were said
_vellaturam facere_. Hence, too, apparently, the Latin word _vilis_ and
our vile; also _villain_. This suggests what kind of degeneracy villagers
are liable to. They are wayworn by the travel that goes by and over them,
without travelling themselves.

Some do not walk at all; others walk in the highways; a few walk across
lots. Roads are made for horses and men of business. I do not travel in