Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/155

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
SUMMER.
145

Young robins, dark-speckled, and the pigeon woodpecker flies up from the ground and darts away.

The farm-houses under their shady trees look as if their inhabitants were taking their siesta at this hour. I pass Baker's in the rear through the open pitch-pine wood. . . . No scouring of tubs or cans now. They eat and all are gone to sleep preparing for an early tea, excepting the in defatigable, never-resting hoers in the cornfield, who have carried a jug of molasses and water to the field, and will wring their shirts to-night. I shall ere long hear the horn blow for their early tea. The wife or the hired Irish woman steps to the door and blows the long tin horn, a cheering sound to the laborers in the field.

The motive of the laborer should be not to get his living, to get a good job, but to perform well a certain work. A town must pay its engineers so well that they shall not feel they are working for low ends, as for a livelihood mainly, but for scientific ends. Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him. who does it for love, and pay him well.

On Mount Misery, panting with heat, looking down the river. The haze an hour ago reached to Wachusett; now it obscures it.

Methinks there is a male and female shore to the river, one abrupt, the other flat and mead-