Toward evening I realised that I had gone without food all day....

On a hill mounting up toward the West, outside of Concord, I stopped at the house of a market-gardener and asked for something to eat.  A tottering old man leaned forward through the half-open door.  He asked me in, and set before me a plate of lukewarm beans and a piece of jelly roll.  But he delighted the tramp in me by setting before me, also, a cup of excellent, hot, strong coffee.

Afterward when he asked me if I wanted a job, I said yes.

The old man lit my way upstairs to a bed in the attic.

It was hardly dawn when he woke me....

A breakfast of soggy pancakes and more beans, which his equally aged wife had prepared.  And we were out in the fields, at work.  And soon his wife was with us, working, too.

When Sowerby, this market gardener, told me that he was almost ninety I could believe him.  He might have added a few more years, with credence.

He went actively about his toil, but yet shaky like a bicycle till it fully starts, when it runs the steadier the more it is speeded.  It was work that kept him on his feet, work that sustained life in him.  His whole life and pleasure was senseless work.

And yet he was not a bookless man.  He possessed many books, mostly the old religious classics.  Fox’s Book of Martyrs, Baxter’s Saint’s Rest, Blair, On the Grave ...  Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Holy Dying, that gave me a shock almost of painful remembrance—­Keats had read the latter when he was dying in Rome ... and there were the New England Divines, the somber Jonathan Edwards whose sermon on the day of doom and the tortures of hell made his auditors faint ...  I thought back to the terrifying sermon of the illiterate negro preacher in the Texas jail.

But now old Sowerby read nothing.  “I have no time left for a book.”

I never met the old man’s equal for parsimony.  “The last man—­the man who worked for me before you came—­he was a Pole, who could hardly speak English.  He left because he didn’t like the food ... yes, that was what he had the impudence to announce ... and you can see that I am not so bad ... don’t I give you a slice of jelly roll with your beans, every other night?”

I assented to what the old man said.  He had been the milkman to the Emerson and Thoreau families, and, in that capacity, had known both the great men.  And I was more eager to hear what he had to say about them, than to draw wages for my work.

But he had little to say about them, except that they were as great fools as the outside world esteemed them great men.

“They talked a lot about work and a man’s being independent, earning his living with his own hands, from the soil, but,—­did they follow their teachings?... that’s the test....

“And I saw them, often, strolling out a-field together, talking and talking a lot of nonsense about philosophy, and going on, regardless, across their neighbours’ crops.”