Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis eBook

For the last six weeks I have been learning what hard work is.  Afternoon leisure is now remembered with the holiday which Saturday brought to the school-boy.  During the haying we have devoted all our time and faculty to the making of hay, leaving the body at night fit only to be devoted to sheets and pillows, and not to grave or even friendly epistolary intercourse.  Oh friends! live upon faith, say I, as I pitch into bed with the ghosts of Sunday morning resolutions of letters tickling my sides or thumping my back, and then sink into dreams where every day seems a day in the valley of Ajalon, and innumerable Joshuas command the sun and moon to stay, and universal leisure spreads over the universe like a great wind.  Then comes morning and wakefulness and boots and breakfast and scythes and heat and fatigue, and all my venerable Joshuas endeavor in vain to make oxen stand still, and I heartily wish them and I back in our valley ruling the heavens and not bending scythes over unseen hassocks which do sometimes bend the words of our mouths into shapes resembling oaths! those most crooked of all speech, but therefore best and fittest for the occasional crooks of life, particularly mowing.  Yet I mow and sweat and get tired very heartily, for I want to drink this cup of farming to the bottom and taste not only the morning froth but the afternoon and evening strength of dregs and bitterness, if there be any.  When haying is over, which event will take place on Saturday night of this week, fair weather being vouchsafed, I shall return to my moderation.  Towards the latter part of the month I shall stray away towards Providence and Newport and sit down by the sea, and in it, too, probably.  So I shall pass until harvest.  Where the snows will fall upon me I cannot yet say.

Say to Charles that I was sorry not to have seen him; but if persons of consequence will travel without previous annunciation, they may chance to find even the humblest of their servants not at home.  I know you will write when the time comes, so I say nothing but that I am your friend ever.

G.W.C.

XVII

CONCORD, Sept. 23, 1844.

Shall we not see you on the day of the cattle-show?  Certainly Brook Farm will be represented; and I think you may, by this time, be farmer enough to enjoy the cattle and the ploughing.  Besides, as I remember a similar excursion last year at which I assisted, the splendor of the early morning, which was not yet awake when we came away from the Farm, will amply repay any extraordinary effort.  And still another besides; I do not want the winter to build its white, impenetrable walls between us before I have heard your voice once more.  I should hope to come and look at you for one day, at least, in West Roxbury; but our Captain has work, autumnal work, the end whereof is not comprehended by the unassisted human vision.  Potato-digging, apple-picking, thrashing, the gathering of innumerable seeds, must be done before winter; and yet to-day is like a despatch from December to announce that snow and ice and wind are to be just as cold this winter as they were the last.