Truly, there is no ground on which to defend
the idleness, and yet as the train strives furiously onward amid these
scenes of fertility and abundance, I like in fancy to loiter behind it,
and to saunter at will up and down the landscape. I stop at the farm-yard
gates, and sit upon the porches or thresholds, and am served with cups of
buttermilk by old Dutch ladies who have done their morning's work and
have leisure to be knitting or sewing; or if there are no old ladies,
with decent caps upon their gray hair, then I do not complain if the
drink is brought me by some red-cheeked, comely young girl, out of
Washington Irving's pages, with no cap on her golden braids, who mirrors
my diffidence, and takes an attitude of pretty awkwardness while she
waits till I have done drinking. In the same easily contented spirit as I
lounge through the barn-yard, if I find the old hens gone about their
family affairs, I do not mind a meadow-lark's singing in the top of the
elm-tree beside the pump. In these excursions the watch-dogs know me for
a harmless person, and will not open their eyes as they lie coiled up in
the sun before the gate. At all the places, I have the people keep bees,
and, in the garden full of worthy pot-herbs, such idlers in the vegetable
world as hollyhocks and larkspurs and four-o'clocks, near a great bed in
which the asparagus has gone to sleep for the season with a dream of
delicate spray hanging over it.
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