September 8, 2025 • 43 mins
18 - Chapter 13. Walden by Henry David Thoreau.
Walden, series of 18 essays by Henry David Thoreau, published in 1854. An important contribution to New England Transcendentalism, the book was a record of Thoreau’s experiment in simple living on the northern shore of Walden Pond in eastern Massachusetts (1845–47). Walden is viewed not only as a philosophical treatise on labour, leisure, self-reliance, and individualism but also as an influential piece of nature writing. It is considered Thoreau’s masterwork.
Walden, series of 18 essays by Henry David Thoreau, published in 1854. An important contribution to New England Transcendentalism, the book was a record of Thoreau’s experiment in simple living on the northern shore of Walden Pond in eastern Massachusetts (1845–47). Walden is viewed not only as a philosophical treatise on labour, leisure, self-reliance, and individualism but also as an influential piece of nature writing. It is considered Thoreau’s masterwork.
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o r G. This reading by Gordon mackenzie Walden by
Henry David Thorough, Chapter thirteen, House Warming. In October, I
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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 not
gather the cranberries, small waxen gems pendants of the meadow grass,
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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, and sells the
spoils of the meads to Boston and New York, destined
to be jammed to satisfy the tastes of lovers of nature.
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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 food for my eyes merely.
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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. They now sleep their
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long sleep under the railroad, with a bag on my
shoulder and a stick to open birrs 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 which they had selected were
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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
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and the jays got most 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.
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Digging one day for fishworms, I discovered the ground nut
Apios tuberosa on its string, the potato of the Aborigines,
a sort of fabulous fruit which I had begun to
doubt if I had ever dug and eaten in childhood,
as I had told, and had not dreamed it. I
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had often seen its crumpled, red, 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.
When I found it better boiled than roasted, this tuber
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seemed like a faint promise 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
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flowering vine. But let wild nature reign here once more,
and 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 corn field of the Indian's god
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in the southwest, whence he is said to have brought it.
But the now almost exterminated 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
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of the Hunter tribe. Some Indian Cerirees or Minerva must
have been the inventor and bestower of it. And when
the rain of poetry commences here, its leaves and string
of nuts may be represented on our works of art. Already,
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by the first of September I had seen two or
three small maples turned scarlet across the pond beneath where
the white stems of three aspens diverged at the point
of a promontory next the water. Ah Many a tale
there color told, and gradually, from week to week the
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character of each tree came out, and it admired itself
reflected in the smooth mirror of the lake. Each morning
the manager of 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
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in October as to winter quarters, and settled on my
windows within and 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
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complimented by their regarding my house as a desirable shelter.
They never molested me seriously, 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
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finally went into winter quarters in November, I used to
resort to the northeast side of Walden, which the sun
reflected from the pitch pine woods and the stony shore
made the fireside of the pond. It is so much
much pleasanter and wholesomer to be warmed by the sun,
while you can be than by an artificial fire. I
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thus warmed myself by the still glowing embers which the summer,
like a departed hunter, 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
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bricks and trowels. The mortar on them was fifty years
old and was said to be still growing harder. But
this is one of 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
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wise acre of them. Many of the villages of Mesopotamia
are built of second hand bricks of a very good quo,
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,
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which bore so many violent blows without being worn out,
as my bricks had been in a chimney before, though
I did not read the name of Nebecudnezar on them.
I picked out as many fireplace bricks as I could
find to save work and waste, and I filled the
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spaces between the bricks about the fireplace with stones from
the pond shore, and also made my mortar with the
white sand from 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
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ground in the morning, a course of bricks raised a
few inches above the floor served for my pillow at night.
Yet 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
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those times which caused me to be put to it
for room. He brought his own knife, though I had two,
and 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,
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it was calculated to endure a long time. The chimney is,
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 independents are apparent. This was toward the end
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of summer. It was now November, the north wind had
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
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because of the numerous chinks between the boards. 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
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I was obliged to confess that it was more comfortable.
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
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other the most expensive furniture. I now first began to
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
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see the soot form on the back of the chimney
which I had built, And I poked the fire with
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
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in one room. It was kitchen, chamber, parlor, and keeping room.
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
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in his rustic villa celeem olierium, venerium dolia multa uti
lubiet cretatum expectaire e ree e vertuti eglorie herit, that is,
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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
my cellar a ferkin of potatoes, about two quarts of
peas with a wee evil in them, and on my
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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 age of enduring materials and without gingerbread work, which
shall still consist of only one room of vast rude,
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substantial primitive hall, without sealing or plastering, with bare rafters
and perlans, supporting a sort of lower heaven over one's head,
useful to keep off rain and snow, where the king
and queen posts stand out, to receive your homage, when
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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 in the recess of a window, and some on settles,
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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,
where the weary traveler may wash and eat, and converse
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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
at one view, and everything hangs upon its peg that
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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 here the pot boil, and
pay your respects to the fire that cooks your dinner,
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and the oven that bakes your bread, and the necessary
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,
and so learn whether the ground is solid or hollow
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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
a guest is to be presented with the freedom of
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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
has got the mason to build one for yourself somewhere
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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.
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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,
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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 metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far fetched through
slides and dumb waiters, as it were, In other words,
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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 the Northwest Territory or
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the Isle of Man tell what is parliamentary in the kitchen? However,
only one or two of my guests where 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 if it would shake the house
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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 opposite shore of the pond in a boat,
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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 was my ambition to transfer the plaster from
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the board to the wall neatly and rapidly. I remembered
the star 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 up his cuffs, seized a plasterer's board, and,
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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. I admired anew the economy and convenience of plastering,
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which so effectually shuts out the cold and takes a
handsome finish, And I learned the various casualties to which
the plasterer is liable. I was surprised to see how
thirsty the bricks were, which drank up all the moisture
in my plaster before I had smoothed it. How many
pailfuls of water it takes to christen a new hearth.
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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 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.
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The pond had, in the meanwhile skimmed over in the
shadiest and shallowest coves, some days or even weeks before
the general freezing. 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.
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For you can lie at your length on ice only
an inch thick, like a skater insect on the surface
of the water, and study the bottom at your leisure,
only two or three inches distant, like a picture befind
hind a glass. And the water is necessarily always smooth.
Then there are many furrows in the sand where some
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creature has traveled about and doubled on its tracks, and
for wrecks. It 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
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them to make. But the ice itself is the object
of most interest, 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,
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are against its under surface, and that more are continually
rising from the bottom, 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
eighth of an inch in diameter, very clear and beautiful,
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and you see your face reflected in them. Through the ice.
There may 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
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quite fresh, minute spherical bubbles, one directly above another, like
a string 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
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with them, which formed very large and conspicuous white bubbles
beneath One day, 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
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had been very warm, like an Indian summer, the ice
was now transparent, showing 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
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and run together and lost their regularity. They were no
longer one directly over another, but often, like silver vvery coins,
poured from a bag, one overlapping another, or in thin flakes,
as if occupying slight cleavages. The beauty of the ice
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was gone, and it was too late to study the bottom.
Being curious to know 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,
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so that it was included between the two ices. It
was wholly in 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
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under the bubble the ice was melted with a great regularity,
in 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
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places the small bubbles in this partition had burst out downward,
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
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frozen in likewise, and that each in its degree had
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.
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The winter set in good earnest, just as I had
finished plastering and the wind began to howl around the
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
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alight in Walden, and some flying low over the woods
toward fair Haven, bound for Mexico. Several times, when 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 my
a pond hole behind my dwelling, where they had come
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up to feed, and the faint honk or quack of
their leader as they hurried off. In eighteen forty five,
Walden 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
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or more in forty six, the sixteenth, in forty nine
about the thirty first, and in fifty about the twenty
seventh of December. In fifty two the fifth of January.
In fifty three, the thirty first of December. The snow
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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
a bright fire, both within my house and within my breast.
My employment out of doors now was to collect the
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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
for me. I sacrificed it to Vulcan, for it was
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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, steel
the fuel to cook it with. His bread and meat
are sweet. There are enough fagots and waste wood of
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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.
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
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by the Irish when the railroad was built. This I
hauled up partly on the shore. After soaking two years
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
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a mile, skating behind, with one end of a log
fifteen feet long on my shoulder and the other on
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.
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Though completely water logged and almost as heavy as lead,
they not only burned long but made a very hot fire. Nay,
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,
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and the houses and fences thus raised on the borders
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 tero reem ferararm at
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nocumentum for a stay, et cetera, to the frightening of
the 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, and as
much as though I had been the lord warden myself.
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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 by the proprietors themselves,
my wood that are farmers, when they cut down a forest,
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felt some of that awe which the old Romans did
when they came to thin or let in the light
to a consecrated grove lussom conlusseire, that is, would believe
that it is sacred to some god. The Roman made
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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. It is remarkable what
a value is still put upon wood, even in this
age and in this new country, a value more permanent
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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 as it was to
our Saxon and Norman ancestors, if they made their bows
of it. We make our gun stocks of it. Michaud,
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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 best wood in Paris,
though this immense capital annually requires more than three hundred
thousand cords and is surrounded to the distance of three
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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 be this year than
it was the last. Mechanics and tradesmen who come in
person to the forest on no other errand are sure
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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 material of the arts,
the new Englander and the new Hollander, the Parisian and
the celt the farmer and Robin Hood, Goody Blake and
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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 warm them
and cook their food. Neither could I do without them.
Every man looks at his wood pile with a kind
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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, which nobody claimed,
with which by spells in winter days and on the
sunny side of the house, I played about the stumps
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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 no fuel could give
out more heat. As for the axe, I was advised
to get the village blacksmith to jump it, but I
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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 fat
pine were a great treasure. It is interesting to remember
how much of this food for fire is still concealed
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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 indestructible. Stumps thirty or
forty years old at least will still be sound at
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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 as
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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. Once
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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 various wild inhabitants of Walden Vale
by a smoky streamer from my chimney that I was awake,
light winged, smoke icarian bird melting thy pinions in thy
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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 day, darkening the
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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 better than any other.
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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 fire that lived there,
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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 only time I
remember to having been particularly anxious on this score. So
I looked and saw that a spark had caught my bed,
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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 in my cellar, nibbling every
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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 survived the winter only because they
are so careful to secure them. Some of my friends
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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, instead of robbing himself,
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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 step or two beyond instinct,
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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 my life. But the most
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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 go on dating from
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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 did not own the forest,
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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.
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The stove not only 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
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they have accumulated during 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. What but my hopes shot upward
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e'er so bright? What but my fortunes sunk so low
in night? Why art thou banished from our hearth? And
hall thou, who art welcomed and beloved by all? Was
thy existence then too fanciful for our life's common light?
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Who are so dull? Did thy bright gleam mysterious converse
hold with our congenial souls secrets too bold? Well? We
are safe and strong. For now we sit beside a
hearth where no dim shadows flick'd, where nothing cheers nor
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saddens but a fire warm's feet in hands. Nor does
two more aspire, by whose compact, utilitarian heap the present
may sit down and go to sleep. Nor fear the
ghosts who from the dim past walk'd and with us,
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by the unequal light of the old wood fire talk'd.
End of chapter thirteen.
This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
the public domain. For more information, please visit LibriVox dot
o r G. This reading by Gordon mackenzie Walden by
Henry David Thorough, Chapter thirteen, House Warming. In October, I
(00:30):
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 not
gather the cranberries, small waxen gems pendants of the meadow grass,
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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, and sells the
spoils of the meads to Boston and New York, destined
to be jammed to satisfy the tastes of lovers of nature.
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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 food for my eyes merely.
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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. They now sleep their
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long sleep under the railroad, with a bag on my
shoulder and a stick to open birrs 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 which they had selected were
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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
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and the jays got most 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.
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Digging one day for fishworms, I discovered the ground nut
Apios tuberosa on its string, the potato of the Aborigines,
a sort of fabulous fruit which I had begun to
doubt if I had ever dug and eaten in childhood,
as I had told, and had not dreamed it. I
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had often seen its crumpled, red, 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.
When I found it better boiled than roasted, this tuber
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seemed like a faint promise 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
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flowering vine. But let wild nature reign here once more,
and 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 corn field of the Indian's god
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in the southwest, whence he is said to have brought it.
But the now almost exterminated 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
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of the Hunter tribe. Some Indian Cerirees or Minerva must
have been the inventor and bestower of it. And when
the rain of poetry commences here, its leaves and string
of nuts may be represented on our works of art. Already,
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by the first of September I had seen two or
three small maples turned scarlet across the pond beneath where
the white stems of three aspens diverged at the point
of a promontory next the water. Ah Many a tale
there color told, and gradually, from week to week the
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character of each tree came out, and it admired itself
reflected in the smooth mirror of the lake. Each morning
the manager of 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
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in October as to winter quarters, and settled on my
windows within and 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
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complimented by their regarding my house as a desirable shelter.
They never molested me seriously, 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
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finally went into winter quarters in November, I used to
resort to the northeast side of Walden, which the sun
reflected from the pitch pine woods and the stony shore
made the fireside of the pond. It is so much
much pleasanter and wholesomer to be warmed by the sun,
while you can be than by an artificial fire. I
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thus warmed myself by the still glowing embers which the summer,
like a departed hunter, 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
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bricks and trowels. The mortar on them was fifty years
old and was said to be still growing harder. But
this is one of 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
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wise acre of them. Many of the villages of Mesopotamia
are built of second hand bricks of a very good quo,
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,
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which bore so many violent blows without being worn out,
as my bricks had been in a chimney before, though
I did not read the name of Nebecudnezar on them.
I picked out as many fireplace bricks as I could
find to save work and waste, and I filled the
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spaces between the bricks about the fireplace with stones from
the pond shore, and also made my mortar with the
white sand from 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
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ground in the morning, a course of bricks raised a
few inches above the floor served for my pillow at night.
Yet 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
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those times which caused me to be put to it
for room. He brought his own knife, though I had two,
and 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,
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it was calculated to endure a long time. The chimney is,
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 independents are apparent. This was toward the end
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of summer. It was now November, the north wind had
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
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because of the numerous chinks between the boards. 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
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I was obliged to confess that it was more comfortable.
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
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other the most expensive furniture. I now first began to
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
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see the soot form on the back of the chimney
which I had built, And I poked the fire with
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
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in one room. It was kitchen, chamber, parlor, and keeping room.
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
(12:19):
in his rustic villa celeem olierium, venerium dolia multa uti
lubiet cretatum expectaire e ree e vertuti eglorie herit, that is,
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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
my cellar a ferkin of potatoes, about two quarts of
peas with a wee evil in them, and on my
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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 age of enduring materials and without gingerbread work, which
shall still consist of only one room of vast rude,
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substantial primitive hall, without sealing or plastering, with bare rafters
and perlans, supporting a sort of lower heaven over one's head,
useful to keep off rain and snow, where the king
and queen posts stand out, to receive your homage, when
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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 in the recess of a window, and some on settles,
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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,
where the weary traveler may wash and eat, and converse
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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
at one view, and everything hangs upon its peg that
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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 here the pot boil, and
pay your respects to the fire that cooks your dinner,
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and the oven that bakes your bread, and the necessary
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,
and so learn whether the ground is solid or hollow
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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
a guest is to be presented with the freedom of
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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
has got the mason to build one for yourself somewhere
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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.
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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,
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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 metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far fetched through
slides and dumb waiters, as it were, In other words,
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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 the Northwest Territory or
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the Isle of Man tell what is parliamentary in the kitchen? However,
only one or two of my guests where 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 if it would shake the house
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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 opposite shore of the pond in a boat,
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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 was my ambition to transfer the plaster from
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the board to the wall neatly and rapidly. I remembered
the star 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 up his cuffs, seized a plasterer's board, and,
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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. I admired anew the economy and convenience of plastering,
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which so effectually shuts out the cold and takes a
handsome finish, And I learned the various casualties to which
the plasterer is liable. I was surprised to see how
thirsty the bricks were, which drank up all the moisture
in my plaster before I had smoothed it. How many
pailfuls of water it takes to christen a new hearth.
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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 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.
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The pond had, in the meanwhile skimmed over in the
shadiest and shallowest coves, some days or even weeks before
the general freezing. 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.
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For you can lie at your length on ice only
an inch thick, like a skater insect on the surface
of the water, and study the bottom at your leisure,
only two or three inches distant, like a picture befind
hind a glass. And the water is necessarily always smooth.
Then there are many furrows in the sand where some
(21:08):
creature has traveled about and doubled on its tracks, and
for wrecks. It 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
(21:31):
them to make. But the ice itself is the object
of most interest, 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,
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are against its under surface, and that more are continually
rising from the bottom, 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
eighth of an inch in diameter, very clear and beautiful,
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and you see your face reflected in them. Through the ice.
There may 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
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quite fresh, minute spherical bubbles, one directly above another, like
a string 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
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with them, which formed very large and conspicuous white bubbles
beneath One day, 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
(23:29):
had been very warm, like an Indian summer, the ice
was now transparent, showing 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
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and run together and lost their regularity. They were no
longer one directly over another, but often, like silver vvery coins,
poured from a bag, one overlapping another, or in thin flakes,
as if occupying slight cleavages. The beauty of the ice
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was gone, and it was too late to study the bottom.
Being curious to know 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,
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so that it was included between the two ices. It
was wholly in 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
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under the bubble the ice was melted with a great regularity,
in 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
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places the small bubbles in this partition had burst out downward,
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
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frozen in likewise, and that each in its degree had
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.
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The winter set in good earnest, just as I had
finished plastering and the wind began to howl around the
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
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alight in Walden, and some flying low over the woods
toward fair Haven, bound for Mexico. Several times, when 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 my
a pond hole behind my dwelling, where they had come
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up to feed, and the faint honk or quack of
their leader as they hurried off. In eighteen forty five,
Walden 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
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or more in forty six, the sixteenth, in forty nine
about the thirty first, and in fifty about the twenty
seventh of December. In fifty two the fifth of January.
In fifty three, the thirty first of December. The snow
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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
a bright fire, both within my house and within my breast.
My employment out of doors now was to collect the
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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
for me. I sacrificed it to Vulcan, for it was
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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, steel
the fuel to cook it with. His bread and meat
are sweet. There are enough fagots and waste wood of
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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.
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
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by the Irish when the railroad was built. This I
hauled up partly on the shore. After soaking two years
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
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a mile, skating behind, with one end of a log
fifteen feet long on my shoulder and the other on
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.
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Though completely water logged and almost as heavy as lead,
they not only burned long but made a very hot fire. Nay,
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,
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and the houses and fences thus raised on the borders
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 tero reem ferararm at
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nocumentum for a stay, et cetera, to the frightening of
the 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, and as
much as though I had been the lord warden myself.
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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 by the proprietors themselves,
my wood that are farmers, when they cut down a forest,
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felt some of that awe which the old Romans did
when they came to thin or let in the light
to a consecrated grove lussom conlusseire, that is, would believe
that it is sacred to some god. The Roman made
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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. It is remarkable what
a value is still put upon wood, even in this
age and in this new country, a value more permanent
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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 as it was to
our Saxon and Norman ancestors, if they made their bows
of it. We make our gun stocks of it. Michaud,
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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 best wood in Paris,
though this immense capital annually requires more than three hundred
thousand cords and is surrounded to the distance of three
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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 be this year than
it was the last. Mechanics and tradesmen who come in
person to the forest on no other errand are sure
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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 material of the arts,
the new Englander and the new Hollander, the Parisian and
the celt the farmer and Robin Hood, Goody Blake and
(33:31):
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 warm them
and cook their food. Neither could I do without them.
Every man looks at his wood pile with a kind
(33:52):
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, which nobody claimed,
with which by spells in winter days and on the
sunny side of the house, I played about the stumps
(34:13):
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 no fuel could give
out more heat. As for the axe, I was advised
to get the village blacksmith to jump it, but I
(34:36):
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 fat
pine were a great treasure. It is interesting to remember
how much of this food for fire is still concealed
(34:56):
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 indestructible. Stumps thirty or
forty years old at least will still be sound at
(35:18):
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 as
(35:39):
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. Once
(36:04):
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 various wild inhabitants of Walden Vale
by a smoky streamer from my chimney that I was awake,
light winged, smoke icarian bird melting thy pinions in thy
(36:28):
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 day, darkening the
(36:51):
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 better than any other.
(37:13):
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 fire that lived there,
(37:36):
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 only time I
remember to having been particularly anxious on this score. So
I looked and saw that a spark had caught my bed,
(38:00):
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 in my cellar, nibbling every
(38:22):
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 survived the winter only because they
are so careful to secure them. Some of my friends
(38:42):
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, instead of robbing himself,
(39:04):
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 step or two beyond instinct,
(39:25):
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 my life. But the most
(39:48):
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 go on dating from
(40:10):
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 did not own the forest,
(40:32):
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.
(40:52):
The stove not only 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
(41:13):
they have accumulated during 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. What but my hopes shot upward
(41:38):
e'er so bright? What but my fortunes sunk so low
in night? Why art thou banished from our hearth? And
hall thou, who art welcomed and beloved by all? Was
thy existence then too fanciful for our life's common light?
(42:02):
Who are so dull? Did thy bright gleam mysterious converse
hold with our congenial souls secrets too bold? Well? We
are safe and strong. For now we sit beside a
hearth where no dim shadows flick'd, where nothing cheers nor
(42:28):
saddens but a fire warm's feet in hands. Nor does
two more aspire, by whose compact, utilitarian heap the present
may sit down and go to sleep. Nor fear the
ghosts who from the dim past walk'd and with us,
(42:53):
by the unequal light of the old wood fire talk'd.
End of chapter thirteen.
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