Page:Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881).djvu/271

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EARLY SPRING IN MASSACHUSETTS.
257

or other, you would say, it had rained arrowheads, for they lie all over the surface of America. You may have your peculiar tastes, certain localities in your town may seem from association unattractive and uninhabitable to you, you may wonder that the land bears any money value there, and pity some poor fellow who is said to survive in that neighborhood, but plow up a new field there, and you will find the omnipresent arrow point strewn over it, and it will appear that the red man with other tastes and associations lived there too. No matter how far from the modern road or meeting-house, no matter how near. They lie in the meeting-house cellar, and they lie in the distant cow-pasture. Some collections which were made a century ago by the curious like myself have been dispersed again, and they are still as good as new. You cannot tell the third-hand ones (for they are all second-hand) from the others, such is their persistent out-of-doors durability. They were chiefly made to be lost. They are sown like a grain that is slow to germinate, broadcast over the earth. As the dragon's teeth bore a crop of soldiers, so these bear crops of philosophers and poets, and the same seed is just as good to plant again. It is a stone fruit. Each one yields me a thought. I come nearer to the maker of it than if I found