“I will be as broad as the earth.  I will not be limited.”

Thus I was born into the present world, and here I continue, not knowing what other world I may yet achieve.  I do not know, but I wait in expectancy, keeping my furrows straight and my corners well turned.  Since that day in the field, though my fences include no more acres, and I still plow my own fields, my real domain has expanded until I crop wide fields and take the profit of many curious pastures.  From my farm I can see most of the world; and if I wait here long enough all people pass this way.

And I look out upon them not in the surroundings which they have chosen for themselves, but from the vantage ground of my familiar world.  The symbols which meant so much in cities mean little here.  Sometimes it seems to me as though I saw men naked.  They come and stand beside my oak, and the oak passes solemn judgment; they tread my furrows and the clods give silent evidence; they touch the green blades of my corn, the corn whispers its sure conclusions.  Stern judgments that will be deceived by no symbols!

Thus I have delighted, secretly, in calling myself an unlimited farmer, and I make this confession in answer to the inner and truthful demand of the soul that we are not, after all, the slaves of things, whether corn, or banknotes, or spindles; that we are not the used, but the users; that life is more than profit and loss.  And so I shall expect that while I am talking farm some of you may be thinking dry goods, banking, literature, carpentry, or what-not.  But if you can say:  I am an unlimited dry goods merchant, I am an unlimited carpenter, I will give you an old-fashioned country hand-shake, strong and warm.  We are friends; our orbits coincide.

II

I BUY A FARM

As I have said, when I came here I came as a renter, working all of the first summer without that “open vision” of which the prophet Samuel speaks.  I had no memory of the past and no hope of the future.  I fed upon the moment.  My sister Harriet kept the house and I looked after the farm and the fields.  In all those months I hardly knew that I had neighbours, although Horace, from whom I rented my place, was not infrequently a visitor.  He has since said that I looked at him as though he were a “statute.”  I was “citified,” Horace said; and “citified” with us here in the country is nearly the limit of invective, though not violent enough to discourage such a gift of sociability as his.  The Scotch Preacher, the rarest, kindest man I know, called once or twice, wearing the air of formality which so ill becomes him.  I saw nothing in him:  it was my fault, not his, that I missed so many weeks of his friendship.  Once in that time the Professor crossed my fields with his tin box slung from his shoulder; and the only feeling I had, born of crowded cities, was that this was an intrusion upon my property.  Intrusion:  and the Professor!  It is now unthinkable.  I often passed the Carpentry Shop on my way to town.  I saw Baxter many times at his bench.  Even then Baxter’s eyes attracted me:  he always glanced up at me as I passed, and his look had in it something of a caress.  So the home of Starkweather, standing aloof among its broad lawns and tall trees, carried no meaning for me.