Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/148

124 unjust surmises; as example, "he lived lazily in a hut, in a lonely wood, subsisting on beans." Dr. Edward Emerson has said of this Walden incident,—"His own Walden camping was but a short experimental episode, and even then this very human and affectionate man constantly visited his friends in the village, and was a most dutiful son and affectionate brother."

On the practical side, as a personal experience, his experiment succeeded. For two years and a half he lived simply and healthily, easily meeting his necessary expenses by an occasional contract for surveying for some neighbor farmer, or by exchange or sale of his beans and other produce. At the same time, he had ample leisure for study and soul-expansion. To-day, one finds the spot near the highway where he sowed, hoed, and harvested vegetables, mainly beans, whose rows would aggregate seven miles, planting some for early, some for later, harvest. The beans became associated not alone with pleasurable physical exercise but also with constant thoughts of lofty scope. The bean was a classic vegetable, associated with myths and heroic history as well as with Roman agriculture. Perchance, Thoreau's poetic, classic-trained mind chose this distinctive vegetable for this reason, but, more probably, his Yankee thrift recognized that