So ineffaceable (oftenest for good, but this time
for ill) is an early impression upon the least honorably esteemed of the
five senses! As a boy, it was one of my tasks to keep down with a scythe
the weeds and bushes in a rocky, thin-soiled cattle pasture. In that
task,--which, at the best, was a little too much like work--my most
troublesome enemy was the common wild indigo (_Baptisia tinctoria_),
partly from the wicked pertinacity with which it sprang up again after
every mowing, but especially from the fact that the cut or bruised stalk
exhaled what in my nostrils was a most abominable odor. Other people do
not find it so offensive, I suspect, but to me it was, and is, ten times
worse than the more pungent but comparatively salubrious perfume which a
certain handsome little black-and-white quadruped--handsome, but
impolite--is given to scattering upon the nocturnal breeze in moments of
extreme perturbation.
Somewhere beyond the Suwanee River (at which I looked as long as it
remained in sight--and thought of Christine Nilsson) there came a sudden
change in the aspect of the country, coincident with a change in the
nature of the soil, from white sand to red clay; a change indescribably
exhilarating to a New Englander who had been living, if only for two
months, in a country without hills. How good it was to see the land
rising, though never so gently, as it stretched away toward the horizon!
My spirits rose with it.
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