Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
The holidays are all about sharing with family, meals, couches, stories,
Gramma secret pecan pie recipe, and now you can also
share a cart with Instacart's family carts. Everyone can add
what they want to one group cart from wherever they are,
so you don't have to go from room to room
to find out who wants cranberry sauce, or who should
get many marshmallows for the ams, or collecting votes for
sugar cookies versus shortbread. Just share a cart and then
(00:22):
share the meals and the moments. Download the instacart app
and get delivery in as fast as thirty minutes. Plus
enjoy free delivery on your first three orders. Service fees
and terms apply.
Speaker 3 (00:32):
Why get all your.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Holiday decorations delivered through instacart Because maybe you only bought
two wreaths but you have twelve windows, Or maybe your
toddler got very eager with the advent calendar, or maybe
the inflatable snowman didn't make it through the snowstorm, or
maybe the twinkle lights aren't twinkling. Whatever the reason, this season,
Instacart's here for hosts and their whole holiday haul. Get
(00:54):
decorations from the home depots cvs and more through Instacart,
and enjoy free delivery on your first three orders.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
Service fees in terms apply.
Speaker 4 (01:02):
Walden by Henry David Thorough, chapter thirteen, House Warming. In October,
I went a graping to the river meadows, and loaded
myself with clusters more precious for their beauty and fragrance
than for food. There Too, I admired, though I did
(01:26):
not gather the cranberries, small waxen gems pendants of the
meadow grass, pearly and red, which the farmer plucks with
an ugly rake, leaving the smooth meadow in a snarl,
heedlessly measuring them by the bushel and the dollar only,
(01:47):
and sells the spoils of the meads to Boston and
New York, destined to be jammed to satisfy the tastes
of lovers of nature. There So, butchers rake the tongues
of bison out of the prairie grass, regardless of the
torn and drooping plant. The barberry's brilliant fruit will likewise
(02:14):
food for my eyes merely. But I collected a small
store of wild apples for coddling, which the proprietor and
travelers had overlooked when chestnuts were ripe, I laid up
half a bushel for winter. It was very exciting at
that season to roam the then boundless chestnut woods of Lincoln.
(02:39):
They now sleep their long sleep under the railroad, with
a bag on my shoulder and a stick to open
birds with in my hand, For I did not always
wait for the frost amid the rustling of leaves and
the loud reproofs of the red squirrels and the jays,
whose half consumed nuts I sometimes stole, for the burrs
(03:01):
which they had selected were sure to contain sound ones.
Occasionally I climbed and shook the trees. They grew also
behind my house, and one large tree which almost overshadowed
it was when in flower a bouquet which scented the
whole neighborhood. But the squirrels and the jays got most
(03:24):
of its fruit, the last coming in flocks early in
the morning and picking the nuts out of the burrs
before they fell. I relinquished these trees to them and
visited the more distant woods composed wholly of chestnut, many
other substitutes might perhaps be found. Digging one day for fishworms,
(03:48):
I discovered the ground nut apios tubarosa on its string
the potato of the Aborigines, a sort of fabulous fruit
which I had begun to doubt if I had ever
dug an eaten in childhood, as I had told, and
had not dreamed it. I had often seen its crumpled, red,
(04:10):
velvety blossom supported by the stems of other plants, without
knowing it to be the same. Cultivation has well nigh
exterminated it. It has a sweetish taste, much like that
of a frost bitten potato, and I found it better
boiled than roasted. This tuber seemed like a faint promise
(04:33):
of nature to rear her own children and feed them
simply here at some future period. In these days of
fatted cattle and waving grain fields, this humble root, which
was once the totem of an Indian tribe, is quite forgotten,
or known only by its flowering vine. But let wild
(04:57):
nature rain here once more. The tender and luxurious English
grains will probably disappear before a myriad of foes, and
without the care of man, the crow may carry back
even the last seed of corn to the great cornfield
of the Indian's god in the southwest whence he is
said to have brought it. But the now almost exterminated
(05:21):
ground nut will perhaps revive and flourish in spite of
frosts and wildness, prove itself indigenous, and resume its ancient
importance and dignity as the diet of the Hunter tribe.
Some Indian Serirees or Minerva must have been the inventor
(05:44):
and bestower of it. And when the reign of poetry
commences here its leaves and string of nuts may be
represented on our works of art. Already, by the first
of September I had seen two or three so small
maples turned scarlet across the pond beneath where the white
(06:05):
stems of three aspens diverged at the point of a
promontory next the water. Ah many a tale their color told,
And gradually, from week to week the character of each
tree came out, and it admired itself reflected in the
smooth mirror of the lake. Each morning the manager of
(06:29):
this gallery substituted some new picture, distinguished by more brilliant
or harmonious coloring for the old upon the walls. The
wasps came by thousands to my lodge in October, as
to winter quarters and settled on my windows within and
(06:50):
on the walls overhead, sometimes deterring visitors from entering. Each morning,
when they were numbed with cold, I swept some of
them out, but I did not trouble myself to get
rid of them. I even felt complimented by their regarding
my house as a desirable shelter. They never molested me seriously,
(07:12):
though they bedded with me, and they gradually disappeared into
what crevices I do not know, avoiding winter and unspeakable
cold like the wasps. Before I finally went into winter
quarters in November, I used to resort to the northeast
(07:32):
side of Walden, which the sun reflected from the pitch
pine woods in the stony shore made the fireside of
the pond. It is so much pleasanter and wholesomer to
be warmed by the sun, while you can be than
by an artificial fire. I thus warmed myself by the
still glowing embers which the summer, like a departed hunter,
(07:56):
had left. When I came to build my chimney, I
studied masonry. My bricks, being second hand ones, required to
be cleaned with a trowel, so that I learned more
than usual of the qualities of bricks and trowels. The
mortar on them was fifty years old and was said
to be still growing harder. But this is one of
(08:20):
those sayings which men love to repeat, whether they are
true or not. Such sayings themselves grow harder and adhere
more firmly with age, and it would take many blows
with a trowel to clean an old wise acre of them.
Many of the villages of Mesopotamia are built of second
(08:40):
hand bricks of a very good quality, obtained from the
ruins of Babylon, and the cement on them is older
and probably harder still. However that may be, I was
struck by the peculiar toughness of the steel, which bore
so many violent blows without being worn out, as my
(09:02):
bricks had been in a chimney before, though I did
not read the name of Nebuchadnezzar on them. I picked
out as many fireplace bricks as I could find to
save work and waste, and I filled the spaces between
the bricks about the fireplace with stones from the pond shore,
and also made my mortar with the white sand from
(09:26):
the same place. I lingered most about the fireplace as
the most vital part of the house. Indeed, I worked
so deliberately that though I commenced at the ground in
the morning, a course of bricks raised a few inches
above the floor served for my pillow at night. Yet
(09:48):
I did not get a stiff neck for it. That
I remember. My stiff neck is of older date. I
took a poet to board for a fortnight about those
times which caused me to be put to it for room.
He brought his own knife, though I had two, and
(10:08):
we used to scour them by thrusting them into the earth.
He shared with me the labors of cooking. I was
pleased to see my work rising so square and solid
by degrees, and reflected that if it proceeded slowly, it
was calculated to endure a long time. The chimney is,
(10:30):
to some extent an independent structure, standing on the ground
and rising through the house to the heavens. Even after
the house is burned, it still stands sometimes, and its
importance and independence are apparent. This was toward the end
of summer. It was now November. The north wind had
(10:54):
already begun to cool the pond, though it took many
weeks of steady blowing to accomplish it. It is so deep.
When I began to have a fire at evening before
I plastered my house, the chimney carried smoke particularly well
because of the numerous chinks between the boards.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
Why get all your holiday decorations delivered through instacart? Because
maybe you only bought two wreaths but you have twelve windows,
Or maybe your toddler got very eager with the advent calendar,
or maybe the inflatable snowman didn't make it through the snowstorm,
or maybe the twinkle lights aren't twinkling. Whatever the reason,
this season, Instacart's here for hosts and their whole holiday hall.
(11:35):
Get decorations from the home depots, cvs and more through
instacart and enjoy free delivery on your first three orders
service fees.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
In terms ofpply, the holidays are all about sharing with family, meals, couches, stories,
Gramma secret pecan pie recipe, and now you can also
share a cart with Instacart's family carts. Everyone can add
what they want to one group cart from wherever they are,
so you don't have to go from room to room
to find out who wants cranberry sauce, or who should
get many marshmallows for the ams, or collecting votes for
(12:02):
sugar cookies versus shortbread. Just share a cart and then
share the meals and the moments. Download the instacart app
and get delivery in as fast as thirty minutes. Plus
enjoy free delivery on your first three orders. Service fees
and terms apply.
Speaker 4 (12:15):
Yet I passed some cheerful evenings in that cool and
airy apartment, surrounded by the rough brown boards full of knots,
and rafters with the bark on high overhead. My house
never pleased my eye so much after it was plastered,
though I was obliged to confess that it was more comfortable.
(12:37):
Should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty
enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may
play at evening about the rafters. These forms are more
agreeable to the fancy and imagination than fresco paintings or
other the most expensive furniture. I now first began to
(13:04):
inhabit my house, I may say, when I began to
use it for warmth as well as shelter. I had
got a couple of old fire dogs to keep the
wood from the hearth, and it did me good to
see the soot form on the back of the chimney
which I had built, and I poked the fire with
(13:24):
more right and more satisfaction than usual. My dwelling was small,
and I could hardly entertain an echo in it, but
it seemed larger for being a single apartment and remote
from neighbors. All the attractions of a house were concentrated
in one room. It was kitchen, chamber, parlor, and keeping room.
(13:48):
And whatever satisfaction parent or child, master or servant derive
from living in a house, I enjoyed it all. Cato
says the master of a family patrem familius, must have
in his rustic villa celeem olierium, venerium dolia multa uti
(14:12):
lubiat cretatum expectaire e ree e vertuti eglorie erith that is,
an oil and wine cellar, many casks, so that it
may be pleasant to expect hard times. It will be
for his advantage and virtue and glory. I had in
(14:37):
my cellar a fercin of potatoes, about two quarts of
peas with a weevil in them, and on my shelf
a little rice, a jug of molasses, and of rye
an Indian meal a peck each. I sometimes dream of
a larger and more populous house, standing in a golden
(14:59):
age of enduring materials, and without gingerbread work, which shall
still consist of only one room of vast rude, substantial
primitive hall, without ceiling or plastering, with bare rafters and perlans,
supporting a sort of lower heaven over one's head, useful
(15:23):
to keep off rain and snow, where the king and
queen posts stand out, to receive your homage, when you
have done reverence to the prostrate saturn of an older dynasty,
on stepping over the sill a cavernous house, wherein you
must reach up a torch upon a pole to see
the roof. Where some may live in the fireplace, some
(15:47):
in the recess of a window, and some on settles,
some at one end of the hall, some at another,
and some aloft on rafters with the spiders, if they
choose a house which you have got into, when you
have opened the outside door and the ceremony is over,
(16:08):
where the weary traveler may wash and eat, and converse
and sleep without further journey. Such a shelter as you
would be glad to reach in a tempestuous night, containing
all the essentials of a house and nothing for housekeeping,
where you can see all the treasures of the house
(16:30):
at one view, and everything hangs upon its peg that
a man should use at once kitchen, pantry, parlor, chamber, store, house,
and garret. Where you can see so necessary a thing
as a barrel or a ladder, so convenient a thing
as a cupboard, and hear the pot boil, and pay
(16:53):
your respects to the fire that cooks your dinner, and
the oven that bakes your bread, and the necessary fur
furniture and utensils are the chief ornaments. Where the washing
is not put out, nor the fire, nor the mistress.
And perhaps you are sometimes requested to move from off
the trap door when the cook would descend into the cellar,
(17:16):
and so learn whether the ground is solid or hollow
beneath you without stamping. A house whose inside is as
open and manifest as a bird's nest, and you cannot
go in at the front door and out at the
back without seeing some of its inhabitants, Where to be
(17:36):
a guest is to be presented with the freedom of
the house and not to be carefully excluded from seven
eighths of it, shut up in a particular cell, and
told to make yourself at home there in solitary confinement. Nowadays,
the host does not admit you to his hearth, but
(17:56):
has got the mason to build one for yourself somewhere
in his alley. And hospitality is the art of keeping
you at the greatest distance. There is as much secrecy
about the cooking as if he had a design to
poison you. I am aware that I have been on
many a man's premises, and might have been legally ordered off.
(18:21):
But I am not aware that I have been in
many men's houses. I might visit, in my old clothes
a king and queen who lived simply in such a
house as I have described, if I were going their way.
But backing out of a modern palace will be all
that I shall desire to learn. If ever I am
(18:44):
caught in one, it would seem as if the very
language of our parlors would lose all its nerve and
degenerate into palaver. Wholly our lives pass such remoteness from
its symbols, and its metaphor and tropes are necessarily so
far fetched through slides and dumb waiters, as it were.
(19:08):
In other words, the parlor is so far from the
kitchen and workshop the dinner even is only the parable
of a dinner. Commonly, as if only the savage dwelt
near enough to nature and truth to borrow a trope
from them, how can the scholar who dwells away in
(19:31):
the Northwest Territory or the Isle of Man tell what
is parliamentary in the kitchen? However, only one or two
of my guests were ever bold enough to stay and
eat a hasty pudding with me. But when they saw
that crisis approaching, they beat a hasty retreat, rather as
(19:54):
if it would shake the house to its foundations. Nevertheless,
it stood through a great many hasty puddings. I did
not plaster till it was freezing weather. I brought over
some whiter and cleaner sand for this purpose from the
(20:15):
opposite shore of the pond in a boat, a sort
of conveyance which would have tempted me to go much
farther if necessary. My house had in the meanwhile been
shingled down to the ground on every side in lathing.
I was pleased to be able to send home each
nail with a single blow of the hammer. And it
(20:36):
was my ambition to transfer the plaster from the board
to the wall neatly and rapidly. I remembered the story
of a conceited fellow who, in fine clothes, was wont
to lounge about the village once giving advice to workmen.
Venturing one day to substitute deeds for words, he turned
(20:57):
up his cuffs, seized a plasterer's board, and, having loaded
his trowel without mishap, with a complaisant look toward the
lathing overhead, made a bold gesture thitherward and straightway. To
his complete discomfiture, received the whole contents in his ruffled bosom.
(21:17):
I admired anew the economy and convenience of plastering, which
so effectually shuts out the cold and takes a handsome finish,
And I learned the various casualties to which the plasterer
is libel. I was surprised to see how thirsty the
bricks were, which drank up all the moisture in my
(21:37):
plaster before I had smoothed it. How many pailfuls of
water it takes to christen a new hearth. I had
the previous winter made a small quantity of lime by
burning the shells of the unio fluviatilis, which our river affords,
for the sake of the experiment, so that I knew
(21:57):
where my materials came from. I might have got good
limestone within a mile or two and burned it myself
if I had cared to do so. The pond had,
in the meanwhile skimmed over in the shadiest and shallowest
coves some days or even weeks before the general freezing.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
The holidays are all about sharing with family, meals, couches, stories,
gramma secret pecan pie recipe, and now you can also
share a cart with Instacart's family carts. Everyone can add
what they want to one group cart from wherever they are,
so you don't have to go from room to room
to find out who wants cranberry sauce, or who should
get many marshmallows for the yams, or collecting votes for
sugar cookies versus shortbread. Just share a cart and then
(22:38):
share the meals and the moments. Download the instacart app
and get delivery in as fast as thirty minutes. Plus
enjoy free delivery on your first three orders, service fees
and terms apply.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
Why get all your holiday decorations delivered through instacart Because
maybe you only bought two wreaths but you have twelve windows,
Or maybe your toddler got very eager with the advent calendar,
or maybe the inflatable well snowman didn't make it through
the snowstorm, or maybe the twinkle lights aren't twinkling. Whatever
the reason, this season, instacarts here for hosts and their
(23:08):
whole holiday hall. Get decorations from the home depot, cevs
and more through Instacart and enjoy free delivery on your.
Speaker 3 (23:14):
First three orders. Service fees in terms apply.
Speaker 4 (23:18):
The first ice is especially interesting and perfect, being hard,
dark and transparent, and affords the best opportunity that ever
offers for examining the bottom where it is shallow. For
you can lie at your length on ice only an
inch thick like a skater insect on the surface of
(23:38):
the water, and study the bottom at your leisure only
two or three inches distant, like a picture behind a glass,
and the water is necessarily always smooth. Then there are
many furrows in the sand where some creature has traveled
about and doubled on its tracks. And for wrecks. It
(24:01):
is strewn with the cases of cattis worms made of
minute grains of white quartz. Perhaps these have creased it,
for you find some of their cases in the furrows,
though they are deep and broad for them to make.
But the ice itself is the object of most interest,
(24:23):
though you must improve the earliest opportunity to study it.
If you examine it closely the morning after it freezes,
you find that the greater part of the bubbles which
at first appeared to be within it, are against its
under surface, and that more are continually rising from the bottom,
(24:48):
while the ice is as yet comparatively solid and dark.
That is, you see the water through it. These bubbles
are from an eightieth to an an eighth of an
inch in diameter, very clear and beautiful, and you see
your face reflected in them through the ice. There may
(25:10):
be thirty or forty of them to a square inch.
There are also already within the ice narrow, oblong perpendicular
bubbles about half an inch long, sharp cones, with the
apex upward or oftener. If the ice is quite fresh,
minute spherical bubbles, one directly above another, like a string
(25:35):
of beads. But these within the ice are not so
numerous nor obvious as those beneath. I sometimes used to
cast on stones to try the strength of the ice,
and those which broke through carried in air with them,
which form very large and conspicuous white bubbles beneath. One day,
(25:58):
when I came to the same place, forty eight hours afterward,
I found that those large bubbles were still perfect, though
an inch more of ice had formed, as I could
see distinctly by the seam in the edge of a cake.
But as the last two days had been very warm,
like an Indian summer, the ice was now transparent, showing
(26:21):
the dark green color of the water and the bottom,
but opaque and whitish or gray, And though twice as thick,
was hardly stronger than before. For the air bubbles had
greatly expanded under this heat and run together and lost
their regularity. They were no longer one directly over another,
(26:44):
but often like silvery coins poured from a bag, one
overlapping another, or in thin flakes, as if occupying slight cleavages.
The beauty of the ice was gone, and it was
too late to study the bottom. Being curious to know
(27:04):
what position my great bubbles occupied with regard to the
new ice. I broke out a cake containing a middling
sized one, and turned it bottom upward. The new ice
had formed around and under the bubble, so that it
was included between the two ices. It was wholly in
(27:27):
the lower ice, but close against the upper, and was
flatish or perhaps slightly lenticular, with a rounded edge a
quarter of an inch deep by four inches in diameter.
And I was surprised to find that directly under the
bubble the ice was melted with a great regularity, in
(27:48):
the form of a saucer reversed to the height of
five eighths of an inch in the middle, leaving a
thin partition there between the water and the bubble, hardly
an eighth of an inch thick. And in many places
the small bubbles in this partition had burst out downward,
(28:09):
and probably there was no ice at all under the
largest bubbles, which were afoot in diameter. I inferred that
the infinite number of minute bubbles which I had first
seen against the under surface of the ice, were now
frozen in likewise, and that each in its degree had
(28:30):
operated like a burning glass on the ice beneath to
melt and rot it. These are the little air guns
which contribute to make the ice crack and whoop at length.
The winter set in good earnest, just as I had
finished plastering, and the wind began to howl around the
(28:52):
house as if it had not had permission to do
so till then. Night after night the geese came lumbering
in the dark with a clangor and a whistling of wings,
even after the ground was covered with snow, some to
a light in Walden, and some flying low over the
woods toward fair Haven, bound for Mexico. Several times, when
(29:17):
returning from the village at ten or eleven o'clock at night,
I heard the tread of a flock of geese or
else ducks on the dry leaves in the woods mya
pond hole behind my dwelling, where they had come up
to feed, and the faint honk or quack of their
leader as they hurried off. In eighteen forty five, Walden
(29:40):
froze entirely over for the first time on the night
of the twenty second of December, flints and other shallower
ponds and the river having been frozen ten days or
more in forty six the sixteenth. In forty nine about
the thirty first, and in fifty about the twenty seventh
(30:04):
of December. In fifty two the fifth of January. In
fifty three, the thirty first of December, the snow had
already covered the ground since the twenty fifth of November,
and surrounded me suddenly with the scenery of winter. I
withdrew yet farther into my shell, and endeavored to keep
(30:26):
a bright fire, both within my house and within my breast.
My employment out of doors now was to collect the
dead wood in the forest, bringing it in my hands
or on my shoulders, or sometimes trailing a dead pine
tree under each arm to my shed. An old forest fence,
which had seen its best days was a great haul
(30:48):
for me. I sacrificed it to Vulcan, for it was
past serving the god Terminus. How much more interesting an
event is that man's supper, who has just been forth
in the snow to hunt, nay, you might say, steal
(31:09):
the fuel to cook it with. His bread and meat
are sweet. There are enough faggots and waste wood of
all kinds in the forest of most of our towns
to support many fires, but which at present warm none,
and some think hinder the growth of the young wood.
(31:29):
There was also the drift wood of the pond. In
the course of the summer I had discovered a raft
of pitch pine logs with the bark on pinned together
by the Irish when the railroad was built. This I
hauled up partly on the shore, after soaking two years,
(31:50):
and then lying high six months. It was perfectly sound,
though water logged past drying. I amused myself one winter
day with sliding this piecemeal across the pond nearly half
a mile, skating behind with one end of a log
fifteen feet long on my shoulder and the other on
(32:11):
the ice or. I tied several logs together with a
birch wivee, and then with a longer birch or alder,
which had a book at the end, dragged them across.
Though completely water logged and almost as heavy as lead,
they not only burned long, but made a very hot fire. Nay,
(32:34):
I thought that they burned better for the soaking, as
if the pitch, being confined by the water, burned longer
as in a lamp. Gilpin, in his account of the
forest Borderers of England, says that the encroachments of trespassers
and the houses and fences thus raised on the borders
(32:56):
of the forest were considered as great nuisances by the
old forest law, and were severely punished under the name
of pure prestures as tending at teror reem ferram at
nocumentum for a stay, etc. To the frightening of the
(33:19):
game and the detriment of the forest. But I was
interested in the preservation of the venison and the vert
more than the hunters or wood choppers.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
The holidays are all about sharing with family, meals, couches, stories,
grammy secret pecan pie recipe, and now you can also
share a cart with Instacart's family carts. Everyone can add
what they want to one group cart from wherever they are,
so you don't have to go from roomed room to
find out who wants cranberry sauce, or who should get
many marshmallows for the ams, or collecting votes for sugar
cookies versus shortbread. Just share a cart and then share
(33:54):
the meals and the moments. Download the instacart app and
get delivery in as fast as thirty minutes. Plus enjoy
freedom delivery on your first three orders. Service fees and
terms apply.
Speaker 2 (34:03):
Why get all your holiday decorations delivered through instacart. Because
maybe you only bought two wreaths but you have twelve windows,
Or maybe your toddler got very eager with the advent calendar,
or maybe the inflatable snowman didn't make it through the snowstorm,
or maybe the twinkle lights aren't twinkling. Whatever the reason,
this season, Instacart's here for hosts and.
Speaker 3 (34:23):
Their whole holiday hall.
Speaker 2 (34:25):
Get decorations from the home depots, cvs and more through
instacart and enjoy free delivery on your.
Speaker 3 (34:30):
First three orders. Service fees in terms apply.
Speaker 4 (34:33):
And as much as though I had been the Lord
warden myself, and if any part was burned, though I
burned it myself by accident, I grieved with a grief
that lasted longer and was more inconsolable than that of
the proprietors. Nay, I grieved when it was cut down
(34:55):
by the proprietors themselves. I would that are farmers, when
they cut down a forest, felt some of that awe
which the old Romans did when they came to thin
or let in the light to a consecrated grove lussum conlusere,
(35:17):
that is, would believe that it is sacred to some god.
The Roman made an expiatory offering and prayed, whatever God
or goddess thou art to whom this grove is sacred,
be propitious to me, my family and children, et cetera.
(35:39):
It is remarkable what a value is still put upon wood,
even in this age and in this new country, a
value more permanent and universal than that of gold. After
all our discoveries and inventions, no man will go by
a pile of wood. It is as precious to us
(36:02):
as it was to our Saxon and Norman ancestors, if
they made their bows of it. We make our gun
stocks of it. Michaux, more than thirty years ago, says
that the price of wood for fuel in New York
and Philadelphia nearly equals and sometimes exceeds, that of the
(36:22):
best wood in Paris, though this immense capital annually requires
more than three hundred thousand cords and is surrounded to
the distance of three hundred miles by cultivated plains. In
this town, the price of wood rises almost steadily, and
the only question is how much higher it is to
(36:44):
be this year than it was the last. Mechanics and
tradesmen who come in person to the forest on no
other errand are sure to attend the wood auction, and
even pay a high price for the privilege of gleaning
after the wood chopper. It is now many years that
men have resorted to the forest for fuel and the
(37:07):
material of the arts. The new Englander and the new Hollander,
the Parisian and the celt the farmer and Robin Hood,
Goody Blake and Harry Gill. In most parts of the world.
The prince and the peasant, the scholar and the savage
equally require still a few sticks from the forest to
(37:31):
warm them and cook their food. Neither could I do
without them. Every man looks at his wood pile with
a kind of affection. I love to have mine before
my window, and the more chips, the better to remind
me of my pleasing work. I had an old axe
(37:51):
which nobody claimed, with which by spells in winter days
and on the sunny side of the house, I played
about the stumps which I had got out of my
bean field, as my driver prophesied. When I was plowing.
They warmed me twice, once while I was splitting them,
and again when they were on the fire, so that
(38:14):
no fuel could give out more heat. As for the axe,
I was advised to get the village blacksmith to jump it,
But I jumped him, and putting a hickory helve from
the woods into it made it do. If it was dull,
it was at least hung. True, A few pieces of
(38:36):
fat pine were a great treasure. It is interesting to
remember how much of this food for fire is still
concealed in the bowels of the earth. In previous years,
I had often gone prospecting over some bare hillside where
a pitch pine wood had formerly stood, and got out
the fat pine roots. They are almost in destructible stumps
(39:02):
thirty or forty years old, at least will still be
sound at the core, though the sap wood has all
become vegetable, mold as appears by the scales of the
thick bark, forming a ring level with the earth four
or five inches distant from the heart. With axe and shovel,
you explore this mine and follow the marrowy store yellow
(39:26):
as beef tallow, or as if you had struck on
a vein of gold deep into the earth. But commonly
I kindled my fire with the dry leaves of the
forest which I had stored up in my shed before
the snow came. Green hickory finely split makes the wood
choppers kindlings when he has a camp in the woods.
(39:51):
Once in a while, I got a little of this
when the villagers were lighting their fires beyond the horizon.
I too, gave notice to the veryarious wild inhabitants of
Walden Vale by a smoky streamer from my chimney that
I was awake, light winged, smoke icarian bird, melting thy
(40:14):
pinions in thy upward flight, lark without a song, and
messenger of dawn, circling above the hamlets as thy nest
or else departing dream and shadowy form of midnight vision,
gathering up thy skirts by night star veiling, and by
(40:37):
day darkening the light and blotting out the sun. Go
thou my incense upward from this hearth, and ask the
gods to pardon this clear flame, hard green wood, just cut,
Though I used but little of that answered my purpose
(40:58):
better than any other. I sometimes left a good fire
when I went to take a walk in a winter afternoon,
and when I returned three or four hours afterward, it
would be still alive and glowing. My house was not
empty though I was gone, it was as if I
had left a cheerful housekeeper behind. It was eye and
(41:21):
fire that lived there, and commonly my housekeeper proved trustworthy.
One day, however, as I was splitting wood, I thought
that I would just look in at the window and
see if the house was not on fire. It was
the old time, I remember to having been particularly anxious
on this score. So I looked and saw that a
(41:46):
spark had caught my bed, and I went in and
extinguished it when it had burned a place as big
as my hand. But my house occupied so sunny and
sheltered a position, and its roof was so low that
I could afford to let the fire go out. In
the middle of almost any winter day, the moles nested
(42:07):
in my cellar, nibbling every third potato and making a
snug bed even there of some hair left after plastering,
and of brown paper. For even the wildest animals love
comfort and warmth as well as man, and they survive
the winter only because they are so careful to secure them.
(42:28):
Some of my friends spoke as if I was coming
to the woods on purpose to freeze myself. The animal
merely makes a bed which he warms with his body
in a sheltered place. But man, having discovered fire, boxes
up some air in a spacious apartment and warms that,
(42:49):
instead of robbing himself, makes that his bed, in which
he can move without divesting of more cumbrous clothing, maintain
a kind of summer in the midst of winter, and
by means of windows even admit the light, and with
a lamp lengthen out the day. Thus he goes a
(43:10):
step or two beyond instinct, and saves a little time
for the fine arts. Though when I had been exposed
to the rudest blasts a long time, my whole body
began to grow torpid. When I reached the genial atmosphere
of my house, I soon recovered my faculties and prolonged
(43:33):
my life. But the most luxuriously housed has little to
boast of in this respect. Nor need we trouble ourselves
to speculate how the human race may be at last destroyed.
It would be easy to cut their threads at any
time with a little sharper blast from the north. We
(43:56):
go on dating from cold fridays and great snows. But
a little colder Friday or greater snow would put a
period to man's existence on the globe. The next winter,
I used a small cooking stove for economy, since I
(44:17):
did not own the forest, But it did not keep
fire so well as the open fireplace. Cooking was, then,
for the most part, no longer a poetic but merely
a chemic process. It will soon be forgotten in these
days of stoves that we used to roast potatoes in
the ashes after the Indian fashion. The stove not only
(44:41):
took up room and scented the house, but it concealed
the fire, and I felt as if I had lost
a companion. You can always see a face in the fire.
The laborer looking into it at evening purifies his thoughts
of the dross and earthiness which they have accumulated during
(45:02):
the day. But I could no longer sit and look
into the fire, and the pertinent words of a poet
recurred to me with new force. Never bright flame may
be denied to me, thy dear life, imaging close sympathy.
(45:23):
What but my hopes shot upward e'er so bright? What
but my fortunes sunk so low in night? Why art
thou banish'd from our hearth? And hall thou who art
welcomed and belov'd by all. Was thy existence then too
(45:45):
fanciful for our life's common light? Who are so dull?
Did thy bright gleam? Mysterious converse hold with our congenial
souls seek it's too bold? Well, we are safe and strong.
(46:06):
For now we sit beside a hearth where no dim
shadows flick'd, where nothing cheers nor saddens, but a fire
warms feet and hands. Nor does two more aspire by
whose compact, utilitarian heap the present may sit down and
(46:31):
go to sleep, Nor fear the ghosts who from the
dim past walked and with us by the unequal light
of the old wood fire talked end of chapter thirteen.
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Speaker 1 (47:27):
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share the meals and the moments. Download the instacart app
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The holidays are all about sharing with family, meals, couches, stories,
Gramma secret pecan pie recipe, and now you can also
share a cart with Instacart's family carts. Everyone can add
what they want to one group cart from wherever they are,
so you don't have to go from room to room
to find out who wants cranberry sauce, or who should
get many marshmallows for the ams, or collecting votes for
sugar cookies versus shortbread. Just share a cart and then
(00:22):
share the meals and the moments. Download the instacart app
and get delivery in as fast as thirty minutes. Plus
enjoy free delivery on your first three orders. Service fees
and terms apply.
Speaker 3 (00:32):
Why get all your.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Holiday decorations delivered through instacart Because maybe you only bought
two wreaths but you have twelve windows, Or maybe your
toddler got very eager with the advent calendar, or maybe
the inflatable snowman didn't make it through the snowstorm, or
maybe the twinkle lights aren't twinkling. Whatever the reason, this season,
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(00:54):
decorations from the home depots cvs and more through Instacart,
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Speaker 3 (01:00):
Service fees in terms apply.
Speaker 4 (01:02):
Walden by Henry David Thorough, chapter thirteen, House Warming. In October,
I went a graping to the river meadows, and loaded
myself with clusters more precious for their beauty and fragrance
than for food. There Too, I admired, though I did
(01:26):
not gather the cranberries, small waxen gems pendants of the
meadow grass, pearly and red, which the farmer plucks with
an ugly rake, leaving the smooth meadow in a snarl,
heedlessly measuring them by the bushel and the dollar only,
(01:47):
and sells the spoils of the meads to Boston and
New York, destined to be jammed to satisfy the tastes
of lovers of nature. There So, butchers rake the tongues
of bison out of the prairie grass, regardless of the
torn and drooping plant. The barberry's brilliant fruit will likewise
(02:14):
food for my eyes merely. But I collected a small
store of wild apples for coddling, which the proprietor and
travelers had overlooked when chestnuts were ripe, I laid up
half a bushel for winter. It was very exciting at
that season to roam the then boundless chestnut woods of Lincoln.
(02:39):
They now sleep their long sleep under the railroad, with
a bag on my shoulder and a stick to open
birds with in my hand, For I did not always
wait for the frost amid the rustling of leaves and
the loud reproofs of the red squirrels and the jays,
whose half consumed nuts I sometimes stole, for the burrs
(03:01):
which they had selected were sure to contain sound ones.
Occasionally I climbed and shook the trees. They grew also
behind my house, and one large tree which almost overshadowed
it was when in flower a bouquet which scented the
whole neighborhood. But the squirrels and the jays got most
(03:24):
of its fruit, the last coming in flocks early in
the morning and picking the nuts out of the burrs
before they fell. I relinquished these trees to them and
visited the more distant woods composed wholly of chestnut, many
other substitutes might perhaps be found. Digging one day for fishworms,
(03:48):
I discovered the ground nut apios tubarosa on its string
the potato of the Aborigines, a sort of fabulous fruit
which I had begun to doubt if I had ever
dug an eaten in childhood, as I had told, and
had not dreamed it. I had often seen its crumpled, red,
(04:10):
velvety blossom supported by the stems of other plants, without
knowing it to be the same. Cultivation has well nigh
exterminated it. It has a sweetish taste, much like that
of a frost bitten potato, and I found it better
boiled than roasted. This tuber seemed like a faint promise
(04:33):
of nature to rear her own children and feed them
simply here at some future period. In these days of
fatted cattle and waving grain fields, this humble root, which
was once the totem of an Indian tribe, is quite forgotten,
or known only by its flowering vine. But let wild
(04:57):
nature rain here once more. The tender and luxurious English
grains will probably disappear before a myriad of foes, and
without the care of man, the crow may carry back
even the last seed of corn to the great cornfield
of the Indian's god in the southwest whence he is
said to have brought it. But the now almost exterminated
(05:21):
ground nut will perhaps revive and flourish in spite of
frosts and wildness, prove itself indigenous, and resume its ancient
importance and dignity as the diet of the Hunter tribe.
Some Indian Serirees or Minerva must have been the inventor
(05:44):
and bestower of it. And when the reign of poetry
commences here its leaves and string of nuts may be
represented on our works of art. Already, by the first
of September I had seen two or three so small
maples turned scarlet across the pond beneath where the white
(06:05):
stems of three aspens diverged at the point of a
promontory next the water. Ah many a tale their color told,
And gradually, from week to week the character of each
tree came out, and it admired itself reflected in the
smooth mirror of the lake. Each morning the manager of
(06:29):
this gallery substituted some new picture, distinguished by more brilliant
or harmonious coloring for the old upon the walls. The
wasps came by thousands to my lodge in October, as
to winter quarters and settled on my windows within and
(06:50):
on the walls overhead, sometimes deterring visitors from entering. Each morning,
when they were numbed with cold, I swept some of
them out, but I did not trouble myself to get
rid of them. I even felt complimented by their regarding
my house as a desirable shelter. They never molested me seriously,
(07:12):
though they bedded with me, and they gradually disappeared into
what crevices I do not know, avoiding winter and unspeakable
cold like the wasps. Before I finally went into winter
quarters in November, I used to resort to the northeast
(07:32):
side of Walden, which the sun reflected from the pitch
pine woods in the stony shore made the fireside of
the pond. It is so much pleasanter and wholesomer to
be warmed by the sun, while you can be than
by an artificial fire. I thus warmed myself by the
still glowing embers which the summer, like a departed hunter,
(07:56):
had left. When I came to build my chimney, I
studied masonry. My bricks, being second hand ones, required to
be cleaned with a trowel, so that I learned more
than usual of the qualities of bricks and trowels. The
mortar on them was fifty years old and was said
to be still growing harder. But this is one of
(08:20):
those sayings which men love to repeat, whether they are
true or not. Such sayings themselves grow harder and adhere
more firmly with age, and it would take many blows
with a trowel to clean an old wise acre of them.
Many of the villages of Mesopotamia are built of second
(08:40):
hand bricks of a very good quality, obtained from the
ruins of Babylon, and the cement on them is older
and probably harder still. However that may be, I was
struck by the peculiar toughness of the steel, which bore
so many violent blows without being worn out, as my
(09:02):
bricks had been in a chimney before, though I did
not read the name of Nebuchadnezzar on them. I picked
out as many fireplace bricks as I could find to
save work and waste, and I filled the spaces between
the bricks about the fireplace with stones from the pond shore,
and also made my mortar with the white sand from
(09:26):
the same place. I lingered most about the fireplace as
the most vital part of the house. Indeed, I worked
so deliberately that though I commenced at the ground in
the morning, a course of bricks raised a few inches
above the floor served for my pillow at night. Yet
(09:48):
I did not get a stiff neck for it. That
I remember. My stiff neck is of older date. I
took a poet to board for a fortnight about those
times which caused me to be put to it for room.
He brought his own knife, though I had two, and
(10:08):
we used to scour them by thrusting them into the earth.
He shared with me the labors of cooking. I was
pleased to see my work rising so square and solid
by degrees, and reflected that if it proceeded slowly, it
was calculated to endure a long time. The chimney is,
(10:30):
to some extent an independent structure, standing on the ground
and rising through the house to the heavens. Even after
the house is burned, it still stands sometimes, and its
importance and independence are apparent. This was toward the end
of summer. It was now November. The north wind had
(10:54):
already begun to cool the pond, though it took many
weeks of steady blowing to accomplish it. It is so deep.
When I began to have a fire at evening before
I plastered my house, the chimney carried smoke particularly well
because of the numerous chinks between the boards.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
Why get all your holiday decorations delivered through instacart? Because
maybe you only bought two wreaths but you have twelve windows,
Or maybe your toddler got very eager with the advent calendar,
or maybe the inflatable snowman didn't make it through the snowstorm,
or maybe the twinkle lights aren't twinkling. Whatever the reason,
this season, Instacart's here for hosts and their whole holiday hall.
(11:35):
Get decorations from the home depots, cvs and more through
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service fees.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
In terms ofpply, the holidays are all about sharing with family, meals, couches, stories,
Gramma secret pecan pie recipe, and now you can also
share a cart with Instacart's family carts. Everyone can add
what they want to one group cart from wherever they are,
so you don't have to go from room to room
to find out who wants cranberry sauce, or who should
get many marshmallows for the ams, or collecting votes for
(12:02):
sugar cookies versus shortbread. Just share a cart and then
share the meals and the moments. Download the instacart app
and get delivery in as fast as thirty minutes. Plus
enjoy free delivery on your first three orders. Service fees
and terms apply.
Speaker 4 (12:15):
Yet I passed some cheerful evenings in that cool and
airy apartment, surrounded by the rough brown boards full of knots,
and rafters with the bark on high overhead. My house
never pleased my eye so much after it was plastered,
though I was obliged to confess that it was more comfortable.
(12:37):
Should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty
enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may
play at evening about the rafters. These forms are more
agreeable to the fancy and imagination than fresco paintings or
other the most expensive furniture. I now first began to
(13:04):
inhabit my house, I may say, when I began to
use it for warmth as well as shelter. I had
got a couple of old fire dogs to keep the
wood from the hearth, and it did me good to
see the soot form on the back of the chimney
which I had built, and I poked the fire with
(13:24):
more right and more satisfaction than usual. My dwelling was small,
and I could hardly entertain an echo in it, but
it seemed larger for being a single apartment and remote
from neighbors. All the attractions of a house were concentrated
in one room. It was kitchen, chamber, parlor, and keeping room.
(13:48):
And whatever satisfaction parent or child, master or servant derive
from living in a house, I enjoyed it all. Cato
says the master of a family patrem familius, must have
in his rustic villa celeem olierium, venerium dolia multa uti
(14:12):
lubiat cretatum expectaire e ree e vertuti eglorie erith that is,
an oil and wine cellar, many casks, so that it
may be pleasant to expect hard times. It will be
for his advantage and virtue and glory. I had in
(14:37):
my cellar a fercin of potatoes, about two quarts of
peas with a weevil in them, and on my shelf
a little rice, a jug of molasses, and of rye
an Indian meal a peck each. I sometimes dream of
a larger and more populous house, standing in a golden
(14:59):
age of enduring materials, and without gingerbread work, which shall
still consist of only one room of vast rude, substantial
primitive hall, without ceiling or plastering, with bare rafters and perlans,
supporting a sort of lower heaven over one's head, useful
(15:23):
to keep off rain and snow, where the king and
queen posts stand out, to receive your homage, when you
have done reverence to the prostrate saturn of an older dynasty,
on stepping over the sill a cavernous house, wherein you
must reach up a torch upon a pole to see
the roof. Where some may live in the fireplace, some
(15:47):
in the recess of a window, and some on settles,
some at one end of the hall, some at another,
and some aloft on rafters with the spiders, if they
choose a house which you have got into, when you
have opened the outside door and the ceremony is over,
(16:08):
where the weary traveler may wash and eat, and converse
and sleep without further journey. Such a shelter as you
would be glad to reach in a tempestuous night, containing
all the essentials of a house and nothing for housekeeping,
where you can see all the treasures of the house
(16:30):
at one view, and everything hangs upon its peg that
a man should use at once kitchen, pantry, parlor, chamber, store, house,
and garret. Where you can see so necessary a thing
as a barrel or a ladder, so convenient a thing
as a cupboard, and hear the pot boil, and pay
(16:53):
your respects to the fire that cooks your dinner, and
the oven that bakes your bread, and the necessary fur
furniture and utensils are the chief ornaments. Where the washing
is not put out, nor the fire, nor the mistress.
And perhaps you are sometimes requested to move from off
the trap door when the cook would descend into the cellar,
(17:16):
and so learn whether the ground is solid or hollow
beneath you without stamping. A house whose inside is as
open and manifest as a bird's nest, and you cannot
go in at the front door and out at the
back without seeing some of its inhabitants, Where to be
(17:36):
a guest is to be presented with the freedom of
the house and not to be carefully excluded from seven
eighths of it, shut up in a particular cell, and
told to make yourself at home there in solitary confinement. Nowadays,
the host does not admit you to his hearth, but
(17:56):
has got the mason to build one for yourself somewhere
in his alley. And hospitality is the art of keeping
you at the greatest distance. There is as much secrecy
about the cooking as if he had a design to
poison you. I am aware that I have been on
many a man's premises, and might have been legally ordered off.
(18:21):
But I am not aware that I have been in
many men's houses. I might visit, in my old clothes
a king and queen who lived simply in such a
house as I have described, if I were going their way.
But backing out of a modern palace will be all
that I shall desire to learn. If ever I am
(18:44):
caught in one, it would seem as if the very
language of our parlors would lose all its nerve and
degenerate into palaver. Wholly our lives pass such remoteness from
its symbols, and its metaphor and tropes are necessarily so
far fetched through slides and dumb waiters, as it were.
(19:08):
In other words, the parlor is so far from the
kitchen and workshop the dinner even is only the parable
of a dinner. Commonly, as if only the savage dwelt
near enough to nature and truth to borrow a trope
from them, how can the scholar who dwells away in
(19:31):
the Northwest Territory or the Isle of Man tell what
is parliamentary in the kitchen? However, only one or two
of my guests were ever bold enough to stay and
eat a hasty pudding with me. But when they saw
that crisis approaching, they beat a hasty retreat, rather as
(19:54):
if it would shake the house to its foundations. Nevertheless,
it stood through a great many hasty puddings. I did
not plaster till it was freezing weather. I brought over
some whiter and cleaner sand for this purpose from the
(20:15):
opposite shore of the pond in a boat, a sort
of conveyance which would have tempted me to go much
farther if necessary. My house had in the meanwhile been
shingled down to the ground on every side in lathing.
I was pleased to be able to send home each
nail with a single blow of the hammer. And it
(20:36):
was my ambition to transfer the plaster from the board
to the wall neatly and rapidly. I remembered the story
of a conceited fellow who, in fine clothes, was wont
to lounge about the village once giving advice to workmen.
Venturing one day to substitute deeds for words, he turned
(20:57):
up his cuffs, seized a plasterer's board, and, having loaded
his trowel without mishap, with a complaisant look toward the
lathing overhead, made a bold gesture thitherward and straightway. To
his complete discomfiture, received the whole contents in his ruffled bosom.
(21:17):
I admired anew the economy and convenience of plastering, which
so effectually shuts out the cold and takes a handsome finish,
And I learned the various casualties to which the plasterer
is libel. I was surprised to see how thirsty the
bricks were, which drank up all the moisture in my
(21:37):
plaster before I had smoothed it. How many pailfuls of
water it takes to christen a new hearth. I had
the previous winter made a small quantity of lime by
burning the shells of the unio fluviatilis, which our river affords,
for the sake of the experiment, so that I knew
(21:57):
where my materials came from. I might have got good
limestone within a mile or two and burned it myself
if I had cared to do so. The pond had,
in the meanwhile skimmed over in the shadiest and shallowest
coves some days or even weeks before the general freezing.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
The holidays are all about sharing with family, meals, couches, stories,
gramma secret pecan pie recipe, and now you can also
share a cart with Instacart's family carts. Everyone can add
what they want to one group cart from wherever they are,
so you don't have to go from room to room
to find out who wants cranberry sauce, or who should
get many marshmallows for the yams, or collecting votes for
sugar cookies versus shortbread. Just share a cart and then
(22:38):
share the meals and the moments. Download the instacart app
and get delivery in as fast as thirty minutes. Plus
enjoy free delivery on your first three orders, service fees
and terms apply.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
Why get all your holiday decorations delivered through instacart Because
maybe you only bought two wreaths but you have twelve windows,
Or maybe your toddler got very eager with the advent calendar,
or maybe the inflatable well snowman didn't make it through
the snowstorm, or maybe the twinkle lights aren't twinkling. Whatever
the reason, this season, instacarts here for hosts and their
(23:08):
whole holiday hall. Get decorations from the home depot, cevs
and more through Instacart and enjoy free delivery on your.
Speaker 3 (23:14):
First three orders. Service fees in terms apply.
Speaker 4 (23:18):
The first ice is especially interesting and perfect, being hard,
dark and transparent, and affords the best opportunity that ever
offers for examining the bottom where it is shallow. For
you can lie at your length on ice only an
inch thick like a skater insect on the surface of
(23:38):
the water, and study the bottom at your leisure only
two or three inches distant, like a picture behind a glass,
and the water is necessarily always smooth. Then there are
many furrows in the sand where some creature has traveled
about and doubled on its tracks. And for wrecks. It
(24:01):
is strewn with the cases of cattis worms made of
minute grains of white quartz. Perhaps these have creased it,
for you find some of their cases in the furrows,
though they are deep and broad for them to make.
But the ice itself is the object of most interest,
(24:23):
though you must improve the earliest opportunity to study it.
If you examine it closely the morning after it freezes,
you find that the greater part of the bubbles which
at first appeared to be within it, are against its
under surface, and that more are continually rising from the bottom,
(24:48):
while the ice is as yet comparatively solid and dark.
That is, you see the water through it. These bubbles
are from an eightieth to an an eighth of an
inch in diameter, very clear and beautiful, and you see
your face reflected in them through the ice. There may
(25:10):
be thirty or forty of them to a square inch.
There are also already within the ice narrow, oblong perpendicular
bubbles about half an inch long, sharp cones, with the
apex upward or oftener. If the ice is quite fresh,
minute spherical bubbles, one directly above another, like a string
(25:35):
of beads. But these within the ice are not so
numerous nor obvious as those beneath. I sometimes used to
cast on stones to try the strength of the ice,
and those which broke through carried in air with them,
which form very large and conspicuous white bubbles beneath. One day,
(25:58):
when I came to the same place, forty eight hours afterward,
I found that those large bubbles were still perfect, though
an inch more of ice had formed, as I could
see distinctly by the seam in the edge of a cake.
But as the last two days had been very warm,
like an Indian summer, the ice was now transparent, showing
(26:21):
the dark green color of the water and the bottom,
but opaque and whitish or gray, And though twice as thick,
was hardly stronger than before. For the air bubbles had
greatly expanded under this heat and run together and lost
their regularity. They were no longer one directly over another,
(26:44):
but often like silvery coins poured from a bag, one
overlapping another, or in thin flakes, as if occupying slight cleavages.
The beauty of the ice was gone, and it was
too late to study the bottom. Being curious to know
(27:04):
what position my great bubbles occupied with regard to the
new ice. I broke out a cake containing a middling
sized one, and turned it bottom upward. The new ice
had formed around and under the bubble, so that it
was included between the two ices. It was wholly in
(27:27):
the lower ice, but close against the upper, and was
flatish or perhaps slightly lenticular, with a rounded edge a
quarter of an inch deep by four inches in diameter.
And I was surprised to find that directly under the
bubble the ice was melted with a great regularity, in
(27:48):
the form of a saucer reversed to the height of
five eighths of an inch in the middle, leaving a
thin partition there between the water and the bubble, hardly
an eighth of an inch thick. And in many places
the small bubbles in this partition had burst out downward,
(28:09):
and probably there was no ice at all under the
largest bubbles, which were afoot in diameter. I inferred that
the infinite number of minute bubbles which I had first
seen against the under surface of the ice, were now
frozen in likewise, and that each in its degree had
(28:30):
operated like a burning glass on the ice beneath to
melt and rot it. These are the little air guns
which contribute to make the ice crack and whoop at length.
The winter set in good earnest, just as I had
finished plastering, and the wind began to howl around the
(28:52):
house as if it had not had permission to do
so till then. Night after night the geese came lumbering
in the dark with a clangor and a whistling of wings,
even after the ground was covered with snow, some to
a light in Walden, and some flying low over the
woods toward fair Haven, bound for Mexico. Several times, when
(29:17):
returning from the village at ten or eleven o'clock at night,
I heard the tread of a flock of geese or
else ducks on the dry leaves in the woods mya
pond hole behind my dwelling, where they had come up
to feed, and the faint honk or quack of their
leader as they hurried off. In eighteen forty five, Walden
(29:40):
froze entirely over for the first time on the night
of the twenty second of December, flints and other shallower
ponds and the river having been frozen ten days or
more in forty six the sixteenth. In forty nine about
the thirty first, and in fifty about the twenty seventh
(30:04):
of December. In fifty two the fifth of January. In
fifty three, the thirty first of December, the snow had
already covered the ground since the twenty fifth of November,
and surrounded me suddenly with the scenery of winter. I
withdrew yet farther into my shell, and endeavored to keep
(30:26):
a bright fire, both within my house and within my breast.
My employment out of doors now was to collect the
dead wood in the forest, bringing it in my hands
or on my shoulders, or sometimes trailing a dead pine
tree under each arm to my shed. An old forest fence,
which had seen its best days was a great haul
(30:48):
for me. I sacrificed it to Vulcan, for it was
past serving the god Terminus. How much more interesting an
event is that man's supper, who has just been forth
in the snow to hunt, nay, you might say, steal
(31:09):
the fuel to cook it with. His bread and meat
are sweet. There are enough faggots and waste wood of
all kinds in the forest of most of our towns
to support many fires, but which at present warm none,
and some think hinder the growth of the young wood.
(31:29):
There was also the drift wood of the pond. In
the course of the summer I had discovered a raft
of pitch pine logs with the bark on pinned together
by the Irish when the railroad was built. This I
hauled up partly on the shore, after soaking two years,
(31:50):
and then lying high six months. It was perfectly sound,
though water logged past drying. I amused myself one winter
day with sliding this piecemeal across the pond nearly half
a mile, skating behind with one end of a log
fifteen feet long on my shoulder and the other on
(32:11):
the ice or. I tied several logs together with a
birch wivee, and then with a longer birch or alder,
which had a book at the end, dragged them across.
Though completely water logged and almost as heavy as lead,
they not only burned long, but made a very hot fire. Nay,
(32:34):
I thought that they burned better for the soaking, as
if the pitch, being confined by the water, burned longer
as in a lamp. Gilpin, in his account of the
forest Borderers of England, says that the encroachments of trespassers
and the houses and fences thus raised on the borders
(32:56):
of the forest were considered as great nuisances by the
old forest law, and were severely punished under the name
of pure prestures as tending at teror reem ferram at
nocumentum for a stay, etc. To the frightening of the
(33:19):
game and the detriment of the forest. But I was
interested in the preservation of the venison and the vert
more than the hunters or wood choppers.
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And as much as though I had been the Lord
warden myself, and if any part was burned, though I
burned it myself by accident, I grieved with a grief
that lasted longer and was more inconsolable than that of
the proprietors. Nay, I grieved when it was cut down
(34:55):
by the proprietors themselves. I would that are farmers, when
they cut down a forest, felt some of that awe
which the old Romans did when they came to thin
or let in the light to a consecrated grove lussum conlusere,
(35:17):
that is, would believe that it is sacred to some god.
The Roman made an expiatory offering and prayed, whatever God
or goddess thou art to whom this grove is sacred,
be propitious to me, my family and children, et cetera.
(35:39):
It is remarkable what a value is still put upon wood,
even in this age and in this new country, a
value more permanent and universal than that of gold. After
all our discoveries and inventions, no man will go by
a pile of wood. It is as precious to us
(36:02):
as it was to our Saxon and Norman ancestors, if
they made their bows of it. We make our gun
stocks of it. Michaux, more than thirty years ago, says
that the price of wood for fuel in New York
and Philadelphia nearly equals and sometimes exceeds, that of the
(36:22):
best wood in Paris, though this immense capital annually requires
more than three hundred thousand cords and is surrounded to
the distance of three hundred miles by cultivated plains. In
this town, the price of wood rises almost steadily, and
the only question is how much higher it is to
(36:44):
be this year than it was the last. Mechanics and
tradesmen who come in person to the forest on no
other errand are sure to attend the wood auction, and
even pay a high price for the privilege of gleaning
after the wood chopper. It is now many years that
men have resorted to the forest for fuel and the
(37:07):
material of the arts. The new Englander and the new Hollander,
the Parisian and the celt the farmer and Robin Hood,
Goody Blake and Harry Gill. In most parts of the world.
The prince and the peasant, the scholar and the savage
equally require still a few sticks from the forest to
(37:31):
warm them and cook their food. Neither could I do
without them. Every man looks at his wood pile with
a kind of affection. I love to have mine before
my window, and the more chips, the better to remind
me of my pleasing work. I had an old axe
(37:51):
which nobody claimed, with which by spells in winter days
and on the sunny side of the house, I played
about the stumps which I had got out of my
bean field, as my driver prophesied. When I was plowing.
They warmed me twice, once while I was splitting them,
and again when they were on the fire, so that
(38:14):
no fuel could give out more heat. As for the axe,
I was advised to get the village blacksmith to jump it,
But I jumped him, and putting a hickory helve from
the woods into it made it do. If it was dull,
it was at least hung. True, A few pieces of
(38:36):
fat pine were a great treasure. It is interesting to
remember how much of this food for fire is still
concealed in the bowels of the earth. In previous years,
I had often gone prospecting over some bare hillside where
a pitch pine wood had formerly stood, and got out
the fat pine roots. They are almost in destructible stumps
(39:02):
thirty or forty years old, at least will still be
sound at the core, though the sap wood has all
become vegetable, mold as appears by the scales of the
thick bark, forming a ring level with the earth four
or five inches distant from the heart. With axe and shovel,
you explore this mine and follow the marrowy store yellow
(39:26):
as beef tallow, or as if you had struck on
a vein of gold deep into the earth. But commonly
I kindled my fire with the dry leaves of the
forest which I had stored up in my shed before
the snow came. Green hickory finely split makes the wood
choppers kindlings when he has a camp in the woods.
(39:51):
Once in a while, I got a little of this
when the villagers were lighting their fires beyond the horizon.
I too, gave notice to the veryarious wild inhabitants of
Walden Vale by a smoky streamer from my chimney that
I was awake, light winged, smoke icarian bird, melting thy
(40:14):
pinions in thy upward flight, lark without a song, and
messenger of dawn, circling above the hamlets as thy nest
or else departing dream and shadowy form of midnight vision,
gathering up thy skirts by night star veiling, and by
(40:37):
day darkening the light and blotting out the sun. Go
thou my incense upward from this hearth, and ask the
gods to pardon this clear flame, hard green wood, just cut,
Though I used but little of that answered my purpose
(40:58):
better than any other. I sometimes left a good fire
when I went to take a walk in a winter afternoon,
and when I returned three or four hours afterward, it
would be still alive and glowing. My house was not
empty though I was gone, it was as if I
had left a cheerful housekeeper behind. It was eye and
(41:21):
fire that lived there, and commonly my housekeeper proved trustworthy.
One day, however, as I was splitting wood, I thought
that I would just look in at the window and
see if the house was not on fire. It was
the old time, I remember to having been particularly anxious
on this score. So I looked and saw that a
(41:46):
spark had caught my bed, and I went in and
extinguished it when it had burned a place as big
as my hand. But my house occupied so sunny and
sheltered a position, and its roof was so low that
I could afford to let the fire go out. In
the middle of almost any winter day, the moles nested
(42:07):
in my cellar, nibbling every third potato and making a
snug bed even there of some hair left after plastering,
and of brown paper. For even the wildest animals love
comfort and warmth as well as man, and they survive
the winter only because they are so careful to secure them.
(42:28):
Some of my friends spoke as if I was coming
to the woods on purpose to freeze myself. The animal
merely makes a bed which he warms with his body
in a sheltered place. But man, having discovered fire, boxes
up some air in a spacious apartment and warms that,
(42:49):
instead of robbing himself, makes that his bed, in which
he can move without divesting of more cumbrous clothing, maintain
a kind of summer in the midst of winter, and
by means of windows even admit the light, and with
a lamp lengthen out the day. Thus he goes a
(43:10):
step or two beyond instinct, and saves a little time
for the fine arts. Though when I had been exposed
to the rudest blasts a long time, my whole body
began to grow torpid. When I reached the genial atmosphere
of my house, I soon recovered my faculties and prolonged
(43:33):
my life. But the most luxuriously housed has little to
boast of in this respect. Nor need we trouble ourselves
to speculate how the human race may be at last destroyed.
It would be easy to cut their threads at any
time with a little sharper blast from the north. We
(43:56):
go on dating from cold fridays and great snows. But
a little colder Friday or greater snow would put a
period to man's existence on the globe. The next winter,
I used a small cooking stove for economy, since I
(44:17):
did not own the forest, But it did not keep
fire so well as the open fireplace. Cooking was, then,
for the most part, no longer a poetic but merely
a chemic process. It will soon be forgotten in these
days of stoves that we used to roast potatoes in
the ashes after the Indian fashion. The stove not only
(44:41):
took up room and scented the house, but it concealed
the fire, and I felt as if I had lost
a companion. You can always see a face in the fire.
The laborer looking into it at evening purifies his thoughts
of the dross and earthiness which they have accumulated during
(45:02):
the day. But I could no longer sit and look
into the fire, and the pertinent words of a poet
recurred to me with new force. Never bright flame may
be denied to me, thy dear life, imaging close sympathy.
(45:23):
What but my hopes shot upward e'er so bright? What
but my fortunes sunk so low in night? Why art
thou banish'd from our hearth? And hall thou who art
welcomed and belov'd by all. Was thy existence then too
(45:45):
fanciful for our life's common light? Who are so dull?
Did thy bright gleam? Mysterious converse hold with our congenial
souls seek it's too bold? Well, we are safe and strong.
(46:06):
For now we sit beside a hearth where no dim
shadows flick'd, where nothing cheers nor saddens, but a fire
warms feet and hands. Nor does two more aspire by
whose compact, utilitarian heap the present may sit down and
(46:31):
go to sleep, Nor fear the ghosts who from the
dim past walked and with us by the unequal light
of the old wood fire talked end of chapter thirteen.
Speaker 2 (46:57):
Why get all your holiday decorations delivered through in stet
Because maybe you only bought two wreaths but you have
twelve windows. Or maybe your toddler got very eager with
the advent calendar, or maybe the inflatable snowman didn't make
it through the snowstorm, or maybe the twinkle lights aren't twinkling.
Whatever the reason, this season, Instacart's here for hosts and
(47:17):
their whole holiday haull get decorations from the home depots
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your first three orders.
Speaker 3 (47:25):
Service fees in terms apply.
Speaker 1 (47:27):
The holidays are all about sharing with family, meals, couches, stories,
Gramma secret, pecan pie recipe, and now you can also
share a cart with Instacart's family carts. Everyone can add
what they want to one group cart from wherever they are,
so you don't have to go from room to room
to find out who wants cranberry sauce, or who should
get many marshmallows for the ams, or collecting votes for
sugar cookies versus shortbread. Just share a cart and then
(47:49):
share the meals and the moments. Download the instacart app
and get delivery in as fast as thirty minutes. Plus
enjoy free delivery on your first three orders. Service fees
and terms apply
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