Bunhill Fields

“ In February 1668, after preaching for a year on trial, he was 'set apart' as joint elder with Kiffin to the baptist congregation at Devonshire Square, London, which office he continued to hold until his death in 1688. His remains were interred in the dissenters' burial-ground in Bunhill Fields, his funeral sermon being preached by Warner. Dyke was a man of sincere piety, a grave and solid divine, and humble and unobtrusive in disposition. ”

“ While Paul Bunyan, Johnny Inkslinger and the Big Swede cruised the remaining timber in the Smiling River country, the loggers renewed their affections for the delights of the old home camp. In the mornings they roamed the cool slopes of old Rock Candy, they gorged themselves with ripe fruit from the raspberry trees and strawberry bushes, and, barefooted, they climbed the maple trees and gamboled over the clover fields. ”

“ In the next field to the steam-plough the old ploughs drawn by horses may be seen at work, and barns still stand, and the old houses. In hill districts oxen are yet yoked to the plough, the scythe and reaping-hook are often seen at work, and, in short, the old and the new so shade and blend together that you can hardly say where one begins and the other ends. ”

“ There are hundreds of acres in the grounds, and adjoining it is a park, the circumference of which is over five miles,—a delightful spot to visit. The trees, embowered avenues, terraces, gardens, and long vistas yet remain as they were centuries ago. The soil, once sacred to the tread of royalty, is now a republican delight to the multitude.
A remarkable depositary of the sainted dead is Bunhill Burial-ground, in one of the busiest parts of London, on a great thoroughfare, opposite the house in which John Wesley died on the 2d of March, 1791. ”

“ So the cranks, and wheels, and knives, and mechanism do not exist—it was a machine in the workshop, but it is not a machine in the wheat-field. For the wheatfield you see is very, very old, and the air is of old time, and the shadow, the flowers, and the sunlight, and that which moves among them becomes of them. The solitary reaper alone in the great field goes round and round, the red fans striking beside him, alone with the sunlight, and the blue sky, and the distant hills; and he and his reaper are as much of the cornfield as the long-forgotten sickle or the reaping-hook. ”

“ John Shears, always a terror for work, got dissatisfied. He began to dream of strange, tempting projects of irrigation and land-clearing. He let himself imagine Paul Bunyan’s logging crews digging ditches, grubbing out stumps, and leveling hills into grand hay and grain fields. Then his dream became an active idea. If logging could somehow be prohibited, abolished, totally exterminated—what then? The loggers would all have to turn farm hands, for farming would be the only remaining industry. And then he, John Shears, the one and only master farmer, would become supreme over all of them ”

“ Enclosure has been effected by simply enclosing the strips of arable land in the open field as they are. The fact that no common rights existed over the Field, supposing this always to have been the case, would have made such enclosure almost a matter of indifference to the other occupiers; and the motive, no doubt, would be the desire to lay the strip down in pasture. The whole field is known to the villagers as 252“the tillage land.” ”

“ Paul Bunyan had his setbacks the same as every logger only his were worse. Being a pioneer he had to invent all his stuff as he went along. Many a time his plans were upset by the mistakes of some swivel-headed strawboss or incompetent foreman. The winter of the blue snow, Shot Gunderson had charge in the Big Tadpole River country. He landed all of his logs in a lake and in the spring when ready to drive he boomed the logs three times around the lake before he discovered there was no outlet to it. High hills surrounded the lake and the drivable stream was ten miles away. ”

“ Raindrops hung on the copper wire like a string of pearls, and the heavy clay of the fields was scooped and moulded by the rain into little saucer-like depressions as if by a potter's thumb. Behind us lay the reserve trenches, their clay walls shored up with wickerwork, and their outskirts fringed with barbed wire whose intricate and volatile coils looked like thistledown. [Pg 61] The village behind whose walls we now sheltered lay in a No Man's Land between the enemy's lines and our own, and the sodden fields were not more desolate. ”

“ But if the sun rises clear, the rays light up the yellow sand of the quarries inland, the dark brown ploughed fields, and the black copses where many a bud is sleeping and waiting for the spring. A haze lies about the Downs and softens their smooth outline as in summer, if you can but face the bleak wind which never rests up there. ”

“ The chalk adheres to the shoes like mortar, and for some time after one has left it each footstep leaves a white mark on the turf. On the ridge the low trees and bushes have an outline like the flame of a candle in a draught—the wind has blown them till they have grown fixed in that shape. In an oak across the ploughed field a flock of wood-pigeons have settled; on the furrows there are chaffinches, and larks rise and float a few yards farther away. ”

“ Such memories read strange to the present generation, proving thereby that the threshing-machine has already grown old. It is so accepted that the fields would seem to lack something if it were absent. It is as natural as the ricks: things grow old so soon in the fields.
On the fitful autumn breeze, with brown leaves whirling and grey grass rustling in the hedges, the hum of the fly-wheel sounds afar, travelling through the mist which hides the hills. ”

“ Their religion, their whole life, was to cut and haul as many logs as possible, and then in the spring to drive these logs down river to the saw mill. And he was greatest in the camp who could fell a tree most accurately and quickly, pile logs highest on the sleds, or ride a log in the roughest water. And the camp boss had to really be boss: he must be able to handle obstreperous loggers, he [Pg 17] must provide for all the needs of his crew without any molly-coddling, and he must be able to get out the round stuff. In all of these ways Paul Bunyan is the idealization of the lumberjack. ”

“ A broad land this seventy-nine miles—how many meadows and corn-fields, hedges and woods, in that distance?—wide enough to seclude any house, to hide it, like an acorn in the grass. Those who have lived all their lives in remote places do not feel the remoteness. No one else seemed to be conscious of the breadth that separated the place from the great centre, but it was, perhaps, that consciousness which deepened the solitude to me. It made the silence more still; the shadows of the oaks yet slower in their movement ”

“ Gored acres. No man's land.
Two other small details marking the open field system require only to be simply mentioned. Corners of the fields which, from their shape, could not be cut up into the usual acre or half-acre strips, were sometimes divided into tapering strips pointed at one end, and called 'gores,' or 'gored acres.' In other cases little odds and ends of unused land remained, which from time immemorial were called 'no man's land,' or 'any one's land,' or 'Jack's land,' as the case might be.
Hitchin, Purwell Field. ”

“ Even if the surface of the field were flat, its boundaries were the irregular curves drawn by streams and mounds. In order to economize space, shots running at right angles to other shots were introduced, and of necessity some furlongs were longer than others. If, however, as was often the case, men were laying out their fields among the folds of the hills, their acres would be yet more irregular both in size and in shape. ”

“ Why not Paul Bunyan? This is a White Pine job and here in the High Sierras the winter snows lie deep, just like the country where Paul grew up. Here are trees that dwarf the largest "cork pine" of the Lake States and many new stunts were planned for logging, milling and manufacturing a product of supreme quality—just the job for Paul Bunyan.
The Red River people had been cutting White Pine in Minnesota for two generations; the crews that came west with them were old heads and every one knew Paul Bunyan of old. ”

“ In a week the plans were finished, and, for a millhouse Paul Bunyan moved the back room of his camp office over to the banks of the Moron River, which had become a mature, decent, dependable stream since the flood; and he put a big crew of his loggers to work, making concrete beds for the saws and edgers and installing the mill machinery. Work dropped to nearly nothing in the woods. Paul Bunyan left the mill construction under the supervision of Ford Fordsen, camp tinker and the only bunkhouse inventor, and he went into the woods to make his men get out logs for the new mill. ”

“ Above the brow the ascent became easy; these brows raised steeper than the general slope are often found on the higher hills. A circular entrenchment encloses the summit, but the rampart has much sunk, and is in places levelled. Here it was pleasant to look back upon the beech woods at the foot of the great Downs, and far over the endless fields of the Weald or plain. Thirty fields could be counted in succession, one after the other, like irregular chess-squares, some corn, some grass, and these only extended to the first undulation, where the woods hid the fields behind them. ”

“ I take it that Isaac Leatham, who, by the way, was a strong advocate of enclosure in general, meant that the open field was, on the whole, enjoyed in as beneficial a manner as if it were enclosed, because there still remained the great disadvantage that each occupier had his lands in widely scattered strips, and had to waste much time and labour in cultivating them ”

“ Gran and Sally Rose had stepped into the garden, and when Kitty returned there after the men had gone, she found them staring up the hill.
A small, square earthworks stood on the green crest that had been bare at twilight. Small figures of men were working all around it, digging up turf, building it higher, stringing a wooden fence in front. Other men passed to and fro over Bunker Hill and the highroad that led to the Neck. ”

“ Bunning-Ford's life was excitement. His temperament bordered on the lethargic. He felt that unless he could obtain excitement life was utterly unbearable. He had sought it all over the world before he had adopted the life of a rancher. Here in the West of Canada he had found something of what he sought. There was the big game shooting in the mountains, and the pursuit of the "grizzly" is the most wildly enthralling chase in the world. There was the taming and "breaking" of the wild and furious "broncho"—the most exemplary "bucking" horse in the world. ”

“ They landed at a village about eight miles distant from Yaoorie, where they found their horses and attendants waiting for them. Here one of the Landers obtained from an Arab a gun which had belonged to Mr. Park, in exchange for his own.
The walls of Yaoorie are between thirty and forty miles in circuit; but this space encloses clusters of huts, with pasture grounds and corn fields. The land is fertile, and produces excellent crops of rice. Yet it must be very unhealthy, for it is in many places swampy, and exposed to inundation. ”

“ But before the renowned timekeeper was found the keeping of his accounts and records was Paul Bunyan’s largest difficulty. He figured wearily and the smell of ink often made him sick. His logging operations grew more extensive as time went on. He brought crews of great little men from overseas and organized his first logging camp. He cleared off seven hundred townships in the Smiling River country for a big farm, and John Shears, his earnest boss farmer, managed it so efficiently that new companies of loggers had to be added to the camp each season to use up the produce ”

“ There had been other difficulties to overcome, too, and as Paul Bunyan spread out a tarpaulin and prepared to roll up his boots and workclothes, he remembered them and praised the saints that they were ended. The next job offered the best promise of easy and simple logging of any he had ever encountered. For miles the land rose in gentle slopes from a wide and smoothly flowing river; there was no brush or noxious vegetation among the clean, straight trees; and, best of all, the timber was of a species now extinct, the Leaning Pine. ”

“ Horsemen are galloping on the turf at the edge of the arable, which is doubtless heavy going. The troop that has worked through the wood labours hard to overtake; the vapour follows again, and horsemen and hounds are lost in the abyss.
On a ridge closer at hand, and above the mist, stand two conical wheat ricks sharply defined—all that a draughtsman could seize on. ”

“ We all pulled off our hoots and went up this slope bare-footed. Seeing there was no real danger, the most timid soon moved up as fearless as the others. I, with the advance, soon reached the soil above, and at the top halted until the Indians and our straggling column closed up. As I looked about me, I discovered, unfolding to my sight, one of the most charming views in this sublimest scenery of nature. During the day before, we had looked with astonishment on the almost boundless peaks, and snow-capped mountains, to be seen from the Mt. Hoffman divide. ”

“ The Lake States tales were the product of the true, the professional lumberjack, the winter recluse, who was shut in with others like minded with himself and with none but his kind as auditors. The Western logger was not so exclusive a type. There were many of the professional loggers, but there were many men in the woods whose main interest was elsewhere, and so the story teller did not have such a select audience. There were other interests in the West to divert Bunyan from his real job and naturally it suffered in consequence. ”