After hoeing, or perhaps reading and writing in the forenoon, I usually bathed again in the pond, washed the dust of labour from my person, and for the afternoon was absolutely free. Every day or two I strolled to the village. As I walked in the woods to see the birds and the squirrels, so I walked in the village to see the men and the boys. Instead of the wind among the pines I heard the carts rattle. One afternoon near the end of the first summer, when I went to the village to get a shoe from the cobbler's, I was seized and put into jail, because I did not pay a tax to, or recognise the authority of, the State. I had gone down to the woods for other purposes. But wherever a man goes men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate Odd Fellows society. However, I was released the next day, obtained my mended shoe, and returned to the woods in season to get my dinner of huckleberries on Fair Haven Hill. I was never molested by any person but those who represented the State. I had no lock nor bolt but for the desk which held my papers, not even a nail to put over my latch or window. I never fastened my door night or day, and though I was absent several days my house was more respected than if it had been surrounded by a file of soldiers. _Exhausted Experience_ I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond side, and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. So with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty then must be the highways of the world--how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity. I learned this, at least by my experiment, that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. In proportion as he simplifies his life the laws of the Universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE Democracy in America