Page:Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881).djvu/129

Rh this sense I am not ambitious. I do not wish my native soil to become exhausted and run out through neglect. Only that traveling is good which reveals to me the value of home and enables me to enjoy it better. That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest. It is strange that men are in such haste to get fame as teachers rather than knowledge as learners.

March 11, 1857. I see and talk with Rice sawing off the ends of clapboards, which he has planed to make them square, for an addition to his house. He has a fire in his shop and plays at house-building there. His life is poetic. He does the work himself. He combines several qualities and talents rarely combined. Though he owns houses in the city whose repairs he attends to, finds tenants for them, and collects the rent, he also has his Sudbury farm and bean-field. Though he lived in a city, he would still be natural, and related to primitive nature around him. Though he owned all Beacon Street, you might find that his mittens were made of the skin of a woodchuck that had ravaged his beanfield. I noticed a woodchuck's skin tacked up to the inside of his shop. He said it had fatted on his beans and William had killed it, and expected to get another to make a pair of mittens of, one not being quite large