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WALDEN Or Life In The Woods

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Mindwarp
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« Reply #30 on: March 23, 2009, 01:53:52 am »

Commerce is unexpectedly confident and serene, alert, adventurous,
and unwearied. It is very natural in its methods withal, far more so
than many fantastic enterprises and sentimental experiments, and hence
its singular success. I am refreshed and expanded when the freight
train rattles past me, and I smell the stores which go dispensing
their odors all the way from Long Wharf to Lake Champlain, reminding
me of foreign parts, of coral reefs, and Indian oceans, and tropical
climes, and the extent of the globe. I feel more like a citizen of the
world at the sight of the palm-leaf which will cover so many flaxen
New England heads the next summer, the Manilla hemp and cocoanut
husks, the old junk, gunny bags, scrap iron, and rusty nails. This
carload of torn sails is more legible and interesting now than if they
should be wrought into paper and printed books. Who can write so
graphically the history of the storms they have weathered as these
rents have done? They are proof-sheets which need no correction.
Here goes lumber from the Maine woods, which did not go out to sea
in the last freshet, risen four dollars on the thousand because of
what did go out or was split up; pine, spruce, cedar- first, second,
third, and fourth qualities, so lately all of one quality, to wave
over the bear, and moose, and caribou. Next rolls Thomaston lime, a
prime lot, which will get far among the hills before it gets
slacked. These rags in bales, of all hues and qualities, the lowest
condition to which cotton and linen descend, the final result of
dress- of patterns which are now no longer cried up, unless it be in
Milwaukee, as those splendid articles, English, French, or American
prints, ginghams, muslins, etc., gathered from all quarters both of
fashion and poverty, going to become paper of one color or a few
shades only, on which, forsooth, will be written tales of real life,
high and low, and founded on fact! This closed car smells of salt
fish, the strong New England and commercial scent, reminding me of the
Grand Banks and the fisheries. Who has not seen a salt fish,
thoroughly cured for this world, so that nothing can spoil it, and
putting, the perseverance of the saints to the blush? with which you
may sweep or pave the streets, and split your kindlings, and the
teamster shelter himself and his lading against sun, wind, and rain
behind it- and the trader, as a Concord trader once did, bang it up by
his door for a sign when he commences business, until at last his
oldest customer cannot tell surely whether it be animal, vegetable, or
mineral, and yet it shall be as pure as a snowflake, and if it be
put into a pot and boiled, will come out an excellent dunfish for a
Saturday's dinner. Next Spanish hides, with the tails still preserving
their twist and the angle of elevation they had when the oxen that
wore them were careering over the pampas of the Spanish Main- a type
of all obstinacy, and evincing how almost hopeless and incurable are
all constitutional vices. I confess, that practically speaking, when I
have learned a man's real disposition, I have no hopes of changing
it for the better or worse in this state of existence. As the
Orientals say, "A cur's tail may be warmed, and pressed, and bound
round with ligatures, and after a twelve years' labor bestowed upon
it, still it will retain its natural form." The only effectual cure
for such inveteracies as these tails exhibit is to make glue of
them, which I believe is what is usually done with them, and then they
will stay put and stick. Here is a hogshead of molasses or of brandy
directed to John Smith, Cuttingsville, Vermont, some trader among
the Green Mountains, who imports for the farmers near his clearing,
and now perchance stands over his bulkhead and thinks of the last
arrivals on the coast, how they may affect the price for him,
telling his customers this moment, as he has told them twenty times
before this morning, that he expects some by the next train of prime
quality. It is advertised in the Cuttingsville Times.

  While these things go up other things come down. Warned by the
whizzing sound, I look up from my book and see some tall pine, hewn on
far northern hills, which has winged its way over the Green
Mountains and the Connecticut, shot like an arrow through the township
within ten minutes, and scarce another eye beholds it; going

                      "to be the mast

              Of some great ammiral."

And hark! here comes the cattle-train bearing the cattle of a thousand
hills, sheepcots, stables, and cow-yards in the air, drovers with
their sticks, and shepherd boys in the midst of their flocks, all
but the mountain pastures, whirled along like leaves blown from the
mountains by the September gales. The air is filled with the
bleating of calves and sheep, and the hustling of oxen, as if a
pastoral valley were going by. When the old bellwether at the head
rattles his bell, the mountains do indeed skip like rams and the
little hills like lambs. A carload of drovers, too, in the midst, on a
level with their droves now, their vocation gone, but still clinging
to their useless sticks as their badge of office. But their dogs,
where are they? It is a stampede to them; they are quite thrown out;
they have lost the scent. Methinks I hear them barking behind the
Peterboro' Hills, or panting up the western slope of the Green
Mountains. They will not be in at the death. Their vocation, too, is
gone. Their fidelity and sagacity are below par now. They will slink
back to their kennels in disgrace, or perchance run wild and strike
a league with the wolf and the fox. So is your pastoral life whirled
past and away. But the bell rings, and I must get off the track and
let the cars go by;

            What's the railroad to me?

            I never go to see

            Where it ends.

            It fills a few hollows,

            And makes banks for the swallows,

            It sets the sand a-blowing,

            And the blackberries a-growing,

but I cross it like a cart-path in the woods. I will not have my
eyes put out and my ears spoiled by its smoke and steam and hissing.

  Now that the cars are gone by and all the restless world with
them, and the fishes in the pond no longer feel their rumbling, I am
more alone than ever. For the rest of the long afternoon, perhaps,
my meditations are interrupted only by the faint rattle of a
carriage or team along the distant highway.
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