The Bean-Field
Meanwhile my beans, the length
of whose rows, added together, was seven miles already
planted, were impatient to be hoed, for the earliest
had grown considerably before the latest were in the
ground; indeed they were not easily to be put off.
What was the meaning of this so steady and self-respecting,
this small Herculean labor, I knew not. I came
to love my rows, my beans, though so many more than
I wanted. They attached me to the earth, and
so I got strength like Antaeus. But why should
I raise them? Only Heaven knows. This
was my curious labor all summer — to make
this portion of the earth’s surface, which had
yielded only cinquefoil, blackberries, johnswort,
and the like, before, sweet wild fruits and pleasant
flowers, produce instead this pulse. What shall
I learn of beans or beans of me? I cherish them,
I hoe them, early and late I have an eye to them;
and this is my day’s work. It is a fine
broad leaf to look on. My auxiliaries are the
dews and rains which water this dry soil, and what
fertility is in the soil itself, which for the most
part is lean and effete. My enemies are worms,
cool days, and most of all woodchucks. The last
have nibbled for me a quarter of an acre clean.
But what right had I to oust johnswort and the rest,
and break up their ancient herb garden? Soon,
however, the remaining beans will be too tough for
them, and go forward to meet new foes.
When I was four years old,
as I well remember, I was brought
from Boston to this my native town, through these
very woods and this field, to the pond. It is
one of the oldest scenes stamped on my memory.
And now to-night my flute has waked the echoes over
that very water. The pines still stand here
older than I; or, if some have fallen, I have cooked
my supper with their stumps, and a new growth is rising
all around, preparing another aspect for new infant
eyes. Almost the same johnswort springs from
the same perennial root in this pasture, and even
I have at length helped to clothe that fabulous landscape
of my infant dreams, and one of the results of my
presence and influence is seen in these bean leaves,
corn blades, and potato vines.
I planted about two acres
and a half of upland; and as it was
only about fifteen years since the land was cleared,
and I myself had got out two or three cords of stumps,
I did not give it any manure; but in the course of
the summer it appeared by the arrowheads which I turned
up in hoeing, that an extinct nation had anciently
dwelt here and planted corn and beans ere white men
came to clear the land, and so, to some extent, had
exhausted the soil for this very crop.
Before yet any woodchuck or
squirrel had run across the road, or
the sun had got above the shrub oaks, while all the
dew was on, though the farmers warned me against it
— I would advise you to do all your work
if possible while the dew is on — I began
to level the ranks of haughty weeds in my bean-field
and throw dust upon their heads. Early in the
morning I worked barefooted, dabbling like a plastic
artist in the dewy and crumbling sand, but later in
the day the sun blistered my feet. There the
sun lighted me to hoe beans, pacing slowly backward
and forward over that yellow gravelly upland, between
the long green rows, fifteen rods, the one end terminating
in a shrub oak copse where I could rest in the shade,
the other in a blackberry field where the green berries
deepened their tints by the time I had made another
bout. Removing the weeds, putting fresh soil
about the bean stems, and encouraging this weed which
I had sown, making the yellow soil express its summer
thought in bean leaves and blossoms rather than in
wormwood and piper and millet grass, making the earth
say beans instead of grass — this was my
daily work. As I had little aid from horses or
cattle, or hired men or boys, or improved implements
of husbandry, I was much slower, and became much more
intimate with my beans than usual. But labor
of the hands, even when pursued to the verge of drudgery,
is perhaps never the worst form of idleness.
It has a constant and imperishable moral, and to the
scholar it yields a classic result. A very agricola
laboriosus was I to travellers bound westward through
Lincoln and Wayland to nobody knows where; they sitting
at their ease in gigs, with elbows on knees, and reins
loosely hanging in festoons; I the home-staying, laborious
native of the soil. But soon my homestead was
out of their sight and thought. It was the only
open and cultivated field for a great distance on
either side of the road, so they made the most of it;
and sometimes the man in the field heard more of travellers’
gossip and comment than was meant for his ear:
“Beans so late! peas so late!” —
for I continued to plant when others had begun to
hoe — the ministerial husbandman had not
suspected it. “Corn, my boy, for fodder;
corn for fodder.” “Does he live
there?” asks the black bonnet of the gray coat;
and the hard-featured farmer reins up his grateful
dobbin to inquire what you are doing where he sees
no manure in the furrow, and recommends a little chip
dirt, or any little waste stuff, or it may be ashes
or plaster. But here were two acres and a half
of furrows, and only a hoe for cart and two hands
to draw it — there being an aversion to
other carts and horses — and chip dirt far
away. Fellow-travellers as they rattled by compared
it aloud with the fields which they had passed, so
that I came to know how I stood in the agricultural
world. This was one field not in Mr. Coleman’s
report. And, by the way, who estimates the value
of the crop which nature yields in the still wilder
fields unimproved by man? The crop of English
hay is carefully weighed, the moisture calculated,
the silicates and the potash; but in all dells and
pond-holes in the woods and pastures and swamps grows
a rich and various crop only unreaped by man.
Mine was, as it were, the connecting link between
wild and cultivated fields; as some states are civilized,
and others half-civilized, and others savage or barbarous,
so my field was, though not in a bad sense, a half-cultivated
field. They were beans cheerfully returning
to their wild and primitive state that I cultivated,
and my hoe played the Rans des Vaches for them.
Near at hand, upon the topmost
spray of a birch, sings the brown
thrasher — or red mavis, as some love to
call him — all the morning, glad of your
society, that would find out another farmer’s
field if yours were not here. While you are planting
the seed, he cries — “Drop it, drop
it — cover it up, cover it up —
pull it up, pull it up, pull it up.” But
this was not corn, and so it was safe from such enemies
as he. You may wonder what his rigmarole, his
amateur Paganini performances on one string or on twenty,
have to do with your planting, and yet prefer it to
leached ashes or plaster. It was a cheap sort
of top dressing in which I had entire faith.
As I drew a still fresher
soil about the rows with my hoe, I
disturbed the ashes of unchronicled nations who in
primeval years lived under these heavens, and their
small implements of war and hunting were brought to
the light of this modern day. They lay mingled
with other natural stones, some of which bore the marks
of having been burned by Indian fires, and some by
the sun, and also bits of pottery and glass brought
hither by the recent cultivators of the soil.
When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music
echoed to the woods and the sky, and was an accompaniment
to my labor which yielded an instant and immeasurable
crop. It was no longer beans that I hoed, nor
I that hoed beans; and I remembered with as much pity
as pride, if I remembered at all, my acquaintances
who had gone to the city to attend the oratorios.
The nighthawk circled overhead in the sunny afternoons
— for I sometimes made a day of it —
like a mote in the eye, or in heaven’s eye, falling
from time to time with a swoop and a sound as if the
heavens were rent, torn at last to very rags and tatters,
and yet a seamless cope remained; small imps that
fill the air and lay their eggs on the ground on bare
sand or rocks on the tops of hills, where few have
found them; graceful and slender like ripples caught
up from the pond, as leaves are raised by the wind
to float in the heavens; such kindredship is in nature.
The hawk is aerial brother of the wave which he sails
over and surveys, those his perfect air-inflated wings
answering to the elemental unfledged pinions of the
sea. Or sometimes I watched a pair of hen-hawks
circling high in the sky, alternately soaring and
descending, approaching, and leaving one another,
as if they were the embodiment of my own thoughts.
Or I was attracted by the passage of wild pigeons
from this wood to that, with a slight quivering winnowing
sound and carrier haste; or from under a rotten stump
my hoe turned up a sluggish portentous and outlandish
spotted salamander, a trace of Egypt and the Nile,
yet our contemporary. When I paused to lean
on my hoe, these sounds and sights I heard and saw
anywhere in the row, a part of the inexhaustible entertainment
which the country offers.
On gala days the town fires
its great guns, which echo like
popguns to these woods, and some waifs of martial
music occasionally penetrate thus far. To me,
away there in my bean-field at the other end of the
town, the big guns sounded as if a puffball had burst;
and when there was a military turnout of which I was
ignorant, I have sometimes had a vague sense all the
day of some sort of itching and disease in the horizon,
as if some eruption would break out there soon, either
scarlatina or canker-rash, until at length some more
favorable puff of wind, making haste over the fields
and up the Wayland road, brought me information of
the “trainers.” It seemed by the
distant hum as if somebody’s bees had swarmed,
and that the neighbors, according to Virgil’s
advice, by a faint tintinnabulum upon the most sonorous
of their domestic utensils, were endeavoring to call
them down into the hive again. And when the sound
died quite away, and the hum had ceased, and the most
favorable breezes told no tale, I knew that they had
got the last drone of them all safely into the Middlesex
hive, and that now their minds were bent on the honey
with which it was smeared.
I felt proud to know that
the liberties of Massachusetts and of
our fatherland were in such safe keeping; and as I
turned to my hoeing again I was filled with an inexpressible
confidence, and pursued my labor cheerfully with a
calm trust in the future.
When there were several bands
of musicians, it sounded as if all
the village was a vast bellows and all the buildings
expanded and collapsed alternately with a din.
But sometimes it was a really noble and inspiring
strain that reached these woods, and the trumpet that
sings of fame, and I felt as if I could spit a Mexican
with a good relish — for why should we
always stand for trifles? — and looked
round for a woodchuck or a skunk to exercise my chivalry
upon. These martial strains seemed as far away
as Palestine, and reminded me of a march of crusaders
in the horizon, with a slight tantivy and tremulous
motion of the elm tree tops which overhang the village.
This was one of the great days; though the sky had
from my clearing only the same everlastingly great
look that it wears daily, and I saw no difference
in it.
It was a singular experience
that long acquaintance which I
cultivated with beans, what with planting, and hoeing,
and harvesting, and threshing, and picking over and
selling them — the last was the hardest
of all — I might add eating, for I did taste.
I was determined to know beans. When they were
growing, I used to hoe from five o’clock in
the morning till noon, and commonly spent the rest
of the day about other affairs. Consider the
intimate and curious acquaintance one makes with various
kinds of weeds — it will bear some iteration
in the account, for there was no little iteration
in the labor — disturbing their delicate
organizations so ruthlessly, and making such invidious
distinctions with his hoe, levelling whole ranks of
one species, and sedulously cultivating another.
That’s Roman wormwood — that’s
pigweed — that’s sorrel —
that’s piper-grass — have at him,
chop him up, turn his roots upward to the sun, don’t
let him have a fibre in the shade, if you do he’ll
turn himself t’ other side up and be as green
as a leek in two days. A long war, not with
cranes, but with weeds, those Trojans who had sun
and rain and dews on their side. Daily the beans
saw me come to their rescue armed with a hoe, and thin
the ranks of their enemies, filling up the trenches
with weedy dead. Many a lusty crest —
waving Hector, that towered a whole foot above his
crowding comrades, fell before my weapon and rolled
in the dust.
Those summer days which some
of my contemporaries devoted to the
fine arts in Boston or Rome, and others to contemplation
in India, and others to trade in London or New York,
I thus, with the other farmers of New England, devoted
to husbandry. Not that I wanted beans to eat,
for I am by nature a Pythagorean, so far as beans are
concerned, whether they mean porridge or voting, and
exchanged them for rice; but, perchance, as some must
work in fields if only for the sake of tropes and
expression, to serve a parable-maker one day.
It was on the whole a rare amusement, which, continued
too long, might have become a dissipation. Though
I gave them no manure, and did not hoe them all once,
I hoed them unusualy well as far as I went, and was
paid for it in the end, “there being in truth,”
as Evelyn says, “no compost or laetation whatsoever
comparable to this continual motion, repastination,
and turning of the mould with the spade.”
“The earth,” he adds elsewhere, “especially
if fresh, has a certain magnetism in it, by which
it attracts the salt, power, or virtue (call it either)
which gives it life, and is the logic of all the labor
and stir we keep about it, to sustain us; all dungings
and other sordid temperings being but the vicars succedaneous
to this improvement.” Moreover, this being
one of those “worn-out and exhausted lay fields
which enjoy their sabbath,” had perchance, as
Sir Kenelm Digby thinks likely, attracted “vital
spirits” from the air. I harvested twelve
bushels of beans.
But to be more particular,
for it is complained that Mr. Coleman
has reported chiefly the expensive experiments of
gentlemen farmers, my outgoes were,—
For a hoe ................................... $ 0.54
Plowing, harrowing, and furrowing ............ 7.50 Too much. 
Beans for seed ............................... 3.12+
Potatoes for seed ............................ 1.33
Peas for seed ................................ 0.40
Turnip seed .................................. 0.06
White line for crow fence .................... 0.02
Horse cultivator and boy three hours ......... 1.00
Horse and cart to get crop ................... 0.75
--------
In all .................................. $14.72+
My income was (patrem familias
vendacem, non emacem esse oportet), from
Nine bushels and twelve quarts of beans sold .. $16.94
Five " large potatoes ..................... 2.50
Nine " small .............................. 2.25
Grass ........................................... 1.00
Stalks .......................................... 0.75
-------
In all .................................... $23.44
Leaving a pecuniary profit,
as I have elsewhere said, of .............. $ 8.71+
This is the result of my experience
in raising beans: Plant the common small white
bush bean about the first of June, in rows three feet
by eighteen inches apart, being careful to select fresh
round and unmixed seed. First look out for worms,
and supply vacancies by planting anew. Then
look out for woodchucks, if it is an exposed place,
for they will nibble off the earliest tender leaves
almost clean as they go; and again, when the young
tendrils make their appearance, they have notice of
it, and will shear them off with both buds and young
pods, sitting erect like a squirrel. But above
all harvest as early as possible, if you would escape
frosts and have a fair and salable crop; you may save
much loss by this means.
This further experience also
I gained: I said to myself, I will
not plant beans and corn with so much industry another
summer, but such seeds, if the seed is not lost, as
sincerity, truth, simplicity, faith, innocence, and
the like, and see if they will not grow in this soil,
even with less toil and manurance, and sustain me,
for surely it has not been exhausted for these crops.
Alas! I said this to myself; but now another
summer is gone, and another, and another, and I am
obliged to say to you, Reader, that the seeds which
I planted, if indeed they were the seeds of those virtues,
were wormeaten or had lost their vitality, and so did
not come up. Commonly men will only be brave
as their fathers were brave, or timid. This
generation is very sure to plant corn and beans each
new year precisely as the Indians did centuries ago
and taught the first settlers to do, as if there were
a fate in it. I saw an old man the other day,
to my astonishment, making the holes with a hoe for
the seventieth time at least, and not for himself to
lie down in! But why should not the New Englander
try new adventures, and not lay so much stress on
his grain, his potato and grass crop, and his orchards
— raise other crops than these? Why
concern ourselves so much about our beans for seed,
and not be concerned at all about a new generation
of men? We should really be fed and cheered if
when we met a man we were sure to see that some of
the qualities which I have named, which we all prize
more than those other productions, but which are for
the most part broadcast and floating in the air, had
taken root and grown in him. Here comes such
a subtile and ineffable quality, for instance, as
truth or justice, though the slightest amount or new
variety of it, along the road. Our ambassadors
should be instructed to send home such seeds as these,
and Congress help to distribute them over all the land.
We should never stand upon ceremony with sincerity.
We should never cheat and insult and banish one another
by our meanness, if there were present the kernel
of worth and friendliness. We should not meet
thus in haste. Most men I do not meet at all,
for they seem not to have time; they are busy about
their beans. We would not deal with a man thus
plodding ever, leaning on a hoe or a spade as a staff
between his work, not as a mushroom, but partially
risen out of the earth, something more than erect,
like swallows alighted and walking on the ground:—
“And as he spake, his
wings would now and then
Spread, as he meant to fly, then close again
—”
so that we should suspect that we
might be conversing with an angel. Bread may
not always nourish us; but it always does us good,
it even takes stiffness out of our joints, and makes
us supple and buoyant, when we knew not what ailed
us, to recognize any generosity in man or Nature,
to share any unmixed and heroic joy.
Ancient poetry and mythology
suggest, at least, that husbandry
was once a sacred art; but it is pursued with irreverent
haste and heedlessness by us, our object being to
have large farms and large crops merely. We
have no festival, nor procession, nor ceremony, not
excepting our cattle-shows and so-called Thanksgivings,
by which the farmer expresses a sense of the sacredness
of his calling, or is reminded of its sacred origin.
It is the premium and the feast which tempt him.
He sacrifices not to Ceres and the Terrestrial Jove,
but to the infernal Plutus rather. By avarice
and selfishness, and a grovelling habit, from which
none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property,
or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape
is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the
farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature
but as a robber. Cato says that the profits of
agriculture are particularly pious or just (maximeque
pius quaestus), and according to Varro the old Romans
“called the same earth Mother and Ceres, and
thought that they who cultivated it led a pious and
useful life, and that they alone were left of the
race of King Saturn.”
We are wont to forget that
the sun looks on our cultivated
fields and on the prairies and forests without distinction.
They all reflect and absorb his rays alike, and the
former make but a small part of the glorious picture
which he beholds in his daily course. In his
view the earth is all equally cultivated like a garden.
Therefore we should receive the benefit of his light
and heat with a corresponding trust and magnanimity.
What though I value the seed of these beans, and
harvest that in the fall of the year? This broad
field which I have looked at so long looks not to
me as the principal cultivator, but away from me to
influences more genial to it, which water and make
it green. These beans have results which are
not harvested by me. Do they not grow for woodchucks
partly? The ear of wheat (in Latin spica, obsoletely
speca, from spe, hope) should not be the only hope
of the husbandman; its kernel or grain (granum from
gerendo, bearing) is not all that it bears.
How, then, can our harvest fail? Shall I not
rejoice also at the abundance of the weeds whose seeds
are the granary of the birds? It matters little
comparatively whether the fields fill the farmer’s
barns. The true husbandman will cease from anxiety,
as the squirrels manifest no concern whether the woods
will bear chestnuts this year or not, and finish his
labor with every day, relinquishing all claim to the
produce of his fields, and sacrificing in his mind
not only his first but his last fruits also.
