The Open And Sunny Interval Still Stretched Away From The River
Sometimes By Two Or More Terraces, To The Distant
Hill-country,
and when we climbed the bank we commonly found an irregular
copse-wood skirting the river, the primitive
Having floated
down-stream long ago to - - the "King's navy." Sometimes we saw
the river-road a quarter or half a mile distant, and the
particolored Concord stage, with its cloud of dust, its van of
earnest travelling faces, and its rear of dusty trunks, reminding
us that the country had its places of rendezvous for restless
Yankee men. There dwelt along at considerable distances on this
interval a quiet agricultural and pastoral people, with every
house its well, as we sometimes proved, and every household,
though never so still and remote it appeared in the noontide, its
dinner about these times. There they lived on, those New England
people, farmer lives, father and grandfather and great-grandfather,
on and on without noise, keeping up tradition, and expecting,
beside fair weather and abundant harvests, we did not learn what.
They were contented to live, since it was so contrived for them,
and where their lines had fallen.
Our uninquiring corpses lie more low
Than our life's curiosity doth go.
Yet these men had no need to travel to be as wise as Solomon in
all his glory, so similar are the lives of men in all countries,
and fraught with the same homely experiences. One half the world
_knows_ how the other half lives.
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