Page:Walden, or, Life in the Woods.djvu/181

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 * Nine bushels and twelve quarts of beans sold,||$16 94
 * Five bushels large potatoes,||&ensp;2 50
 * Nine bushels small,||&emsp;2 25
 * Grass, ||&emsp;1 00
 * Stalks,||
 * In all,||$23 44
 * Leaving a pecuniary profit, as I have elsewhere said, of $8 $71 1⁄2$.
 * }
 * Stalks,||
 * In all,||$23 44
 * Leaving a pecuniary profit, as I have elsewhere said, of $8 ⇭⇭⇭.
 * }
 * Leaving a pecuniary profit, as I have elsewhere said, of $8 ⇭⇭⇭.
 * }
 * }

This is the result of my experience in raising beans. Plant the common small white bush bean about the first of June, in rows three feet by eighteen inches apart, being careful to select fresh round and unmixed seed. First look out for worms, and supply vacancies by planting anew. Then look out for woodchucks, if it is an exposed place, for they will nibble off the earliest tender leaves almost clean as they go; and again, when the young tendrils make their appearance, they have notice of it, and will shear them off with both buds and young pods, sitting erect like a squirrel. But above all harvest as early as possible, if you would escape frosts and have a fair and salable crop; you may save much loss by this means.

This further experience also I gained. I said to myself, I will not plant beans and corn with so much industry another summer, but such seeds, if the seed is not lost, as sincerity, truth, simplicity, faith, innocence, and the like, and see if they will not grow in this soil, even with less toil and manurance, and sustain me, for surely it has not been exhausted for these crops. Alas! I said this to myself; but now another summer is gone, and another, and another, and I am obliged to say to you, Reader, that the seeds which I planted, if indeed they were the seeds of those virtues, were wormeaten or had lost their vitality, and so did not come up. Commonly men will only be brave as their fathers were