Brute Neigbors by Henry David Thoreau

The following text is provided for academic use only. In case of typographical errors and some missing contents, students are encouraged to look for printed copies which may be available at the University of Antique Library or other libraries, or from other sources. Brute Neighbors by Henry David Thoreau BRUTE NEIGHBORS. SOMETIMES I had a companion in my fishing, who came through the village to my house from the other side of the town, and the catching of the dinner was as much a social exercise as the eating of it. Hermit. I wonder what the world is doing now. I have not heard so much as a locust over the sweet-fern these three hours. The pigeons are all asleep upon their roosts- no flutter from them. Was that a farmer's noon horn which sounded from beyond the woods just now? The hands are coming in to boiled salt beef and cider and Indian bread. Why will men worry themselves so? He that does not eat need not work. I wonder how much they have reaped. Who would live there where a body can never think for the barking of Bose? And oh, the housekeeping! to keep bright the devil's door-knobs, and scour his tubs this bright day! Better not keep a house. Say, some hollow ware; and then for morning calls and dinner-parties! Only a woodpecker tapping. Oh, they swarm; the sun is too warm there; they are born too far into life for me. I have water from the spring, and a loaf of brown bread on the shelf.- Hark! I hear a rustling of the leaves. Is it some ill-fed village bound yielding to the instinct of the chase? or the lost pig which is said to be in these woods, whose tracks I saw after the rain? It comes on apace; my sumachs and sweetbriers tremble.- Eh, Mr. Poet, is it you? How do you like the world today? Poet. See those clouds; how they hang! That's the greatest thing I have seen today. There's nothing like it in old paintings, nothinglike it in foreign lands- unless when we were off the coast of Spain. That's a true Mediterranean sky. I thought, as I have my living to get, and have not eaten today, that I might go a-fishing. That's the true industry for poets. It is the only trade I have learned. Come, let's along. Hermit. I cannot resist. My brown bread will soon be gone. I will go with you gladly soon, but I am just concluding a serious meditation. I think that I am near the end of it. Leave me alone, then, for a while. But that we may not be delayed, you shall be digging the bait meanwhile. Angleworms are rarely to be met with in these parts, where the soil was never fattened with manure; the race is nearly extinct. The sport of digging the bait is nearly equal to that of catching the fish, when one's appetite is not too keen; and this you may have all to yourself today. I would advise you to set in the spade down yonder among the groundnuts, where you see the johnswort waving. I think that I may warrant you one worm to every three sods you turn up, if you look well in among the roots of the grass, as if you were weeding. Or, if you choose to go farther, it will not be unwise, for I have found the increase of fair bait to be very nearly as the squares of the distances. Hermit alone. Let me see; where was I? Methinks I was nearly in this frame of mind; the world lay about at this angle. Shall I go to heaven or a-fishing? If I should soon bring this meditation to an end, would another so sweet occasion be likely to offer? I was as near being resolved into the essence of things as ever I was in my life. I fear my thoughts will not come back to me. If it would do any good, I would whistle for them. When they make us an offer, is it wise to say, We will think of it? My thoughts have left no track, and I cannot find the path again. What was it that I was thinking of? It was a very hazy day. I will just try these three sentences of Confucious- see; they may fetch that state about again. I know not whether it was the dumps or a budding ecstasy. Mem. There never is but one opportunity of a kind. Poet. How now, Hermit, is it too soon? I have got just thirteen whole ones, beside several which are imperfect or undersized; but they will do for the smaller fry; they do not cover up the hook so much. Those village worms are quite too large; a shiner may make a meal off one without finding the skewer. Hermit. Well, then, let's be off. Shall we to the Concord? There's good sport there if the water be not too high. Why do precisely these objects which we behold make a world? Why has man just these species of animals for his neighbors; as if nothing but a mouse could have filled this crevice? I suspect that Pilpay & Co.have put animals to their best use, for they are all beasts of burden, in a sense, made to carry some portion of our thoughts. The mice which haunted my house were not the common ones, which are said to have been introduced into the country, but a wild native kind not found in the village. I sent one to a distinguished naturalist, and it interested him much. When I was building, one of these had its nest underneath the house, and before I had laid the second floor, and swept out the shavings, would come out regularly at lunch time and pick up the crumbs at my feet. It probably had never seen a man before; and it soon became quite familiar, and would run over my shoes and up my clothes. It could readily ascend the sides of the room by short impulses, like a squirrel, which it resembled in its motions. At length, as I leaned with my elbow on the bench one day, it ran up my clothes, and along my sleeve, and round and round the paper which held my dinner, while I kept the latter close, and dodged and played at bo peep with it; and when at last I held still a piece of cheese between my thumb and finger, it came and nibbled it, sitting in my hand, and afterward cleaned its face and paws, like a fly, and walked away. A phoebe soon built in my shed, and a robin for protection in a pine which grew against the house. In June the partridge (Tetrao umbellus),which is so shy a bird, led her brood past my windows, from the woods in the rear to the front of my house, clucking and calling to them like a hen, and in all her behavior proving herself the hen of the woods. The young suddenly disperse on your approach, at a signal from the mother, as if a whirlwind had swept them away, and they so exactly resemble the dried leaves and twigs that many a traveler has placed his foot in the midst of a brood, and heard the whir of the old bird as she flew off, and her anxious calls and mewing, or seen her trail her wings to attract his attention, without suspecting their neighborhood. The parent will sometimes roll and spin round before you in such a dishabille, that you cannot, for a few moments, detect what kind of creature it is. The young squat still and flat, often running their heads under a leaf, and mind only their mother's directions given from a distance, nor will your approach make them run again and betray themselves. You may even tread on them, or have your eyes on them for a minute, without discovering them. I have held them in my open hand at such a time, and still their only care, obedient to their mother and their instinct, was to squat there without fear or trembling. So perfect is this instinct, that once, when I had laid them on the leaves again, and one accidentally fell on its side, it was found with the rest in exactly the same position ten minutes afterward. They are not callow like the young of most birds, but more perfectly developed and precocious even than chickens. The remarkably adult yet innocent expression of their open and serene eyes is very memorable. All intelligence seems reflected in them. They suggest not merely the purity of infancy, but a wisdom clarified by experience. Such an eye was not born when the bird was, but is coeval with the sky it reflects. The woods do not yield another such a gem. The traveller does not often look into such a limpid well. The ignorant or reckless sportsman often shoots the parent at such a time, and leaves these innocents to fall a prey to some prowling beast or bird, or gradually mingle with the decaying leaves which they so much resemble. It is said that when hatched by a hen they will directly disperse on some alarm, and so are lost, for they never hear the mother's call which gathers them again. These were my hens and chickens. It is remarkable how many creatures live wild and free though secret in the woods, and still sustain themselves in the neighborhood of towns, suspected by hunters only. How retired the otter manages to live here! He grows to be four feet long, as big as a small boy, perhaps without any human being getting a glimpse of him. I formerly saw the raccoon in the woods behind where my house is built, and probably still heard their whinnering at night. Commonly I rested an hour or two in the shade at noon, after planting, and ate my lunch, and read a little by a spring which was the source of a swamp and of a brook, oozing from under Brister's Hill, half a mile from my field. The approach to this was through a succession of descending grassy hollows, full of young pitch pines, into a larger wood about the swamp. There, in a very secluded and shaded spot, under a spreading white pine, there was yet a clean, firm sward to sit on. I had dug out the spring and made a well of clear gray water, where I could dip up a pailful without roiling it, and thither I went for this purpose almost every day in midsummer, when the pond was warmest. Thither, too, the woodcock led her brood, to probe the mud for worms, flying but afoot above them down the bank, while they ran in a troop beneath; but at last, spying me, she would leave her young and circle round and round me, nearer and nearer till within four or five feet, pretending broken wings and legs, to attract my attention, and get off her young, who would already have taken up their march, with faint, wiry peep, single file through the swamp, as she directed. Or I heard the peep of the young when I could not see the parent bird. There too the turtle doves sat over the spring, or fluttered from bough to bough of the soft white pines over my head; or the red squirrel, coursing down the nearest bough, was particularly familiar and inquisitive. You only need sit still long enough in some attractive spot in the woods that all its inhabitants may exhibit themselves to you by turns. I was witness to events of a less peaceful character. One day when I went out to my wood-pile, or rather my pile of stumps, I observed two large ants, the one red, the other much larger, nearly half an inch long, and black, fiercely contending with one another. Having once got hold they never let go, but struggled and wrestled and rolled on the chips incessantly. Looking farther, I was surprised to find that the chips were covered with such combatants, that it was not a duellum, but a bellum, a war between two races of ants, the red always pitted against the black, and frequently two red ones to one black. The legions of these Myrmidons covered all the hills and vales in my woodyard, and the ground was already strewn with the dead and dying, both red and black. It was the only battle which I have ever witnessed, the only battle-field I ever trod while the battle was raging; internecine war; the red republicans on the one hand, and the black imperialists on the other. On every side they were engaged in deadly combat, yet without any noise that I could hear, and human soldiers never fought so resolutely. I watched a couple that were fast locked in each other's embraces, in a little sunny valley amid the chips, now at noonday prepared to fight till the sun went down, or life went out. The smaller red champion had fastened himself like a vice to his adversary's front, and through all the tumblings on that field never for an instant ceased to gnaw at one of his feelers near the root, having already caused the other to go by the board; while the stronger black one dashed him from side to side, and, as I saw on looking nearer, had already divested him of several of his members. They fought with more pertinacity than bulldogs. Neither manifested the least disposition to retreat. It was evident that their battle-cry was "Conquer or die." In the meanwhile there came along a single redant on the hillside of this valley, evidently full of excitement, who either had despatched his foe, or had not yet taken part in the battle; probably the latter, for he had lost none of his limbs; whose mother had charged him to return with his shield or upon it. Or perchance he was some Achilles, who had nourished his wrath apart, and had now come to avenge or rescue his Patroclus. He saw this unequal combat from afar- for the blacks were nearly twice the size of the red- he drew near with rapid pace till be stood on his guard within half an inch of the combatants; then, watching his opportunity, he sprang upon the black warrior, and commenced his operations near the root of his right fore leg, leaving the foe to select among his own members; and so there were three united for life, as if a new kind of attraction had been invented which put all other locks and cements to shame. I should not have wondered by this time to find that they had their respective musical bands stationed on some eminent chip, and playing their national airs the while, to excite the slow and cheer the dying combatants. I was myself excited somewhat even as if they had been men. The more you think of it, the less the difference. And certainly there is not the fight recorded in Concord history, at least, if in the history of America, that will bear a moment's comparison with this, whether for the numbers engaged in it, or for the patriotism and heroism displayed. For numbers and for carnage it was an Austerlitz or Dresden. Concord Fight! Two killed on the patriots' side, and Luther Blanchard wounded! Why here every ant was a Buttrick- "Fire! for God's sake fire!"- and thousands shared the fate of Davis and Hosmer. There was not one hireling there. I have no doubt that it was a principle they fought for, as much as our ancestors, and not to avoid a three-penny tax on their tea; and the results of this battle will be as important and memorable to those whom it concerns as those of the battle of Bunker Hill, at least. I took up the chip oil which the three I have particularly described were struggling, carried it into my house, and placed it under a tumbler on my window-sill, in order to see the issue. Holding a microscope to the first-mentioned red ant, I saw that, though he was assiduously gnawing at the near fore leg of his enemy, having severed his remaining feeler, his own breast was all torn away, exposing what vitals he had there to the jaws of the black warrior, whose breastplate was apparently too thick for him to pierce; and the dark carbuncles of the sufferer's eyes shone with ferocity such as war only could excite. They struggled half an hour longer under the tumbler, and when I looked again the black soldier had severed the heads of his foes from their bodies, and the still living heads were hanging on either side of him like ghastly trophies at his saddle-bow, still apparently as firmly fastened as ever, and he was endeavoring with feeble struggles, being without feelers and with only the remnant of a leg, and I know not how many other wounds, to divest himself of them; which at length, after half an hour more, he accomplished. I raised the glass, and he went off over the window-sill in that crippled state. Whether he finally survived that combat, and spent the remainder of his days in some Hotel des Invalides, I do not know; but I thought that his industry would not be worth much thereafter. I never learned which party was victorious, nor the cause of the war; but I felt for the rest of that day as if I had had my feelings excited and harrowed by witnessing the struggle, the ferocity and carnage, of a human battle before my door. Kirby and Spence tell us that the battles of ants have long been celebrated and the date of them recorded, though they say that Huberis the only modern author who appears to have witnessed them. "Aeneas Sylvius," say they, "after giving a very circumstantial account of one contested with great obstinacy by a great and small species on the trunk of a pear tree," adds that "'this action was fought in the pontificate of Eugenius the Fourth, in the presence of Nicholas Pistoriensis, an eminent lawyer, who related the whole, history of the battle with the greatest fidelity.' A similar engagement between great and small ants is recorded by Olaus Magnus,in which the small ones, being victorious, are said to have buried the bodies of their own soldiers, but left those of their giant enemies a prey to the birds. This event happened previous to the expulsion of the tyrant Christiern the Second from Sweden." The battle which I witnessed took place in the Presidency of Polk, five years beforet he passage of Webster's Fugitive-Slave Bill. Many a village Bose, fit only to course a mud-turtle in a victualling cellar, sported his heavy quarters in the woods, without the knowledge of his master, and ineffectually smelled at old fox burrows and woodchucks' holes; led perchance by some slight cur which nimbly threaded the wood, and might still inspire a natural terror in its denizens;- now far behind his guide, barking like a canine bull toward some small squirrel which had treed itself for scrutiny, then, cantering off, bending the bushes with his weight, imagining that he is on the track of some stray member of the jerbilla family. Once I was surprised to see a cat walking along the stony shore of the pond, for they rarely wander so far from home. The surprise was mutual. Nevertheless the most domestic cat, which has sling on a rug all her days, appears quite at home in the woods, and, by her sly and stealthy behavior, proves herself more native there than the regular inhabitants. Once, when berrying, I met with a cat with young kittens in the woods, quite wild, and they all, like their mother, had their backs up and were fiercely spitting at me. A few years before I lived in the woods there was what was called a "winged cat" in one of the farm-houses in Lincoln nearest the pond, Mr. Gilian Baker's. When I called to see her in June, 1842, she was gone a-hunting in the woods, as was her wont (I am not sure whether it was a male or female, and so use the more common pronoun), but her mistress told me that she came into the neighborhood a little morethan a year before, in April, and was finally taken into theirhouse; that she was of a dark brownish-gray color, with a white spot on her throat, and white feet, and had a large bushy tail like a fox; that in the winter the fur grew thick and flatted out along her sides, forming stripes ten or twelve inches long by two and a half wide, and under her chin like a muff, the upper side loose, the under matted like felt, and in the spring these appendages dropped off. They gave me a pair of her "wings," which I keep still. There is no appearance of a membrane about them. Some thought it was part flying squirrel or some other wild animal, which is not impossible, for, according to naturalists, prolific hybrids have been produced by the union of the marten and domestic cat. This would have been the right kind of cat for me to keep, if I had kept any; for why should not a poet's cat be winged as well as his horse? In the fall the loon (Colymbus glacialis) came, as usual, to moult and bathe in the pond, making the woods ring with his wild laughter before I had risen. At rumor of his arrival all the Mill-dam sportsmen are on the alert, in gigs and on foot, two by two and three by three, with patent rifles and conical balls and spy-glasses. They come rustling through the woods like autumn leaves, at least ten men to onel oon. Some station themselves on this side of the pond, some on that, for the poor bird cannot be omnipresent; if he dive here he must come up there. But now the kind October wind rises, rustling the leaves and rippling the surface of the water, so that no loon can be heard or seen, though his foes sweep the pond with spy-glasses, and make the woods resound with their discharges. The waves generously rise and dash angrily, taking sides with all water-fowl, and our sportsmen must beat a retreat to town and shop and unfinished jobs. But they were too often successful. When I went to get a pail of water early in the morning I frequently saw this stately bird sailing out of my cove within a few rods. If I endeavored to overtake him in a boat, in order to see how he would manoeuvre, he would dive and be completely lost, so that I did not discover him again, sometimes, till the latter part of the day. But I was more than a match for him on the surface. He commonly went off in a rain. As I was paddling along the north shore one very calm October afternoon, for such days especially they settle on to the lakes, like the milkweed down, having looked in vain over the pond for a loon, suddenly one, sailing out from the shore toward the middle a few rods in front of me, set up his mild laugh and betrayed himself. I pursued with a paddle and he dived, but when he came up I was nearer than before. He dived again, but I miscalculated the direction he would take, and we were fifty rods apart when he came to the surface this time, for I had helped to widen the interval; and again he laughed long and loud, and with more reason than before. He manoeuvred so cunningly that I could not get within half a dozen rods of him. Each time, when he came to the surface, turning his head this way and that, he cooly surveyed the water and the land, and apparently chose his course so that he might come up where there was the widest expanse of water and at the greatest distance from the boat. It was surprising how quickly he made up his mind and put his resolve into execution. He led me at once to the widest part of the pond, and could not be driven from it. While he was thinking one thing in his brain, I was endeavoring to divine his thought in mine. It was a pretty game, played on the smooth surface of the pond, a man against a loon. Suddenly your adversary's checker disappears beneath the board, and the problem is to place yours nearest to where his will appear again. Sometimes he would come up unexpectedly on the opposite side of me, having apparently passed directly under the boat. So long-winded was he and so unweariable, that when he had swum farthest he would immediately plunge again, nevertheless; and then no wit could divine where in the deep pond, beneath the smooth surface, he might be speeding his way like a fish, for he had time and ability to visit the bottom of the pond in its deepest part. It is said that loons have been caught in the New York lakes eighty feet beneath the surface, with hooks set for trout- though Walden is deeper than that. How surprised must the fishes be to see this ungainly visitor from another sphere speeding his way amid their schools! Yet he appeared to know his course as surely under water as on the surface, and swam much faster there. Once or twice I saw a ripple where he approached the surface, just put his head out to reconnoitre, and instantly dived again. I found that it was as well for me to rest on my oars and wait his reappearing as to endeavor to calculate where he would rise; for again and again, when I was straining my eyes over the surface one way, I would suddenly be startled by his unearthly laugh behind me. But why, after displaying so much cunning, did he invariably betray himself the moment he came up by that loud laugh? Did not his white breast enough betray him? He was indeed a silly loon, I thought. I could commonly hear the splash of the water when he came up, and so also detected him. But after an hour he seemed a fresh as ever, dived as willingly, and swam yet farther than at first. It was surprising to see how serenely he sailed off with unruffled breast when he came to the surface, doing all the work with his webbed feet beneath. His usual note was this demoniac laughter, yet somewhat like that of a water-fowl; but occasionally, when he had balked me most successfully and come up a long way off, he uttered along-drawn unearthly howl, probably more like that of a wolf than any bird; as when a beast puts his muzzle to the ground and deliberately howls. This was his looning- perhaps the wildest sound that is ever heard here, making the woods ring far and wide. I concluded that he laughed in derision of my efforts, confident of his own resources. Though the sky was by this time overcast, the pond was so smooth that I could see where he broke the surface when I did not hear him. His white breast, the stillness of the air, and the smoothness of the water were all against him. At length having come up fifty rods off, he uttered one of those prolonged howls, as if calling on the god of loons to aid him, and immediately there came a wind from the east and rippled the surface, and filled the whole air with misty rain, and I was impressed as if it were the prayer of theloon answered, and his god was angry with me; and so I left him disappearing far away on the tumultuous surface. For hours, in fall days, I watched the ducks cunningly tack and veerand hold the middle of the pond, far from the sportsman; tricks which they will have less need to practise in Louisiana bayous. When compelled to rise they would sometimes circle round and round and over the pond at a considerable height, from which they could easily see too thier ponds and the river, like black motes in the sky; and, when I thought they had gone off thither long since, they would settle down by a slanting flight of a quarter of a mile on to a distant part which was left free; but what beside safety they got by sailing in the middle of Walden I do not know, unless they love its water for the same reason that I do. HOUSE-WARMING. IN OCTOBER I went a-graping to the river meadows, and loadedmyself with clusters more precious for their beauty and fragrance thanfor food. There, too, I admired, though I did not gather, thecranberries, small waxen gems, pendants of the meadow grass, pearlyand red, which the farmer plucks with an ugly rake, leaving the smoothmeadow in a snarl, heedlessly measuring them by the bushel and thedollar only, and sells the spoils of the meads to Boston and New York;destined to be jammed, to satisfy the tastes of lovers of Naturethere. So butchers rake the tongues of bison out of the prairie grass,regardless of the torn and drooping plant. The barberry's brilliantfruit was likewise food for my eyes merely; but I collected a smallstore of wild apples for coddling, which the proprietor and travellershad overlooked. When chestnuts were ripe I laid up half a bushel forwinter. It was very exciting at that season to roam the then boundlesschestnut woods of Lincoln- they now sleep their long sleep under therailroad- with a bag on my shoulder, and a stick to open burs within my hand, for I did not always wait for the frost, amid the rustlingof leaves and the loud reproofs of the red squirrels and the jays,whose half-consumed nuts I sometimes stole, for the burs which theyhad selected were sure to contain sound ones. Occasionally I climbedand shook the trees. They grew also behind my house, and one largetree, which almost overshadowed it, was, when in flower, a bouquetwhich scented the whole neighborhood, but the squirrels and the jaysgot most of its fruit; the last coming in flocks early in themorning and picking the nuts out of the burs before they fell, Irelinquished these trees to them and visited the more distant woodscomposed wholly of chestnut. These nuts, as far as they went, were agood substitute for bread. Many other substitutes might, perhaps, befound. Digging one day for fishworms, I discovered the groundnut(Apios tuberosa) on its string, the potato of the aborigines, a sortof fabulous fruit, which I had begun to doubt if I had ever dug andeaten in childhood, as I had told, and had not dreamed it. I had oftensince seen its crumpled red velvety blossom supported by the stemsof other plants without knowing it to be the same. Cultivation haswell-nigh exterminated it. It has a sweetish taste, much like thatof a frost-bitten potato, and I found it better boiled than roasted.This tuber seemed like a faint promise of Nature to rear her ownchildren and feed them simply here at some future period. In thesedays of fatted cattle and waving grain-fields this humble root,which was once the totem of an Indian tribe, is quite forgotten, orknown only by its flowering vine; but let wild Nature reign hereonce more, and the tender and luxurious English grains will probablydisappear before a myriad of foes, and without the care of man thecrow may carry back even the last seed of corn to the greatcornfield of the Indian's God in the southwest, whence he is said tohave brought it; but the now almost exterminated ground-nut willperhaps revive and flourish in spite of frosts and wildness, proveitself indigenous, and resume its ancient importance and dignity asthe diet of the hunter tribe. Some Indian Ceres or Minerva must havebeen the inventor and bestower of it; and when the reign of poetrycommences here, its leaves and string of nuts may be represented onour works of art. Already, by the first of September, I had seen two or three smallmaples turned scarlet across the pond, beneath where the white stemsof three aspens diverged, at the point of a promontory, next thewater. Ah, many a tale their color told! Arid gradually from week toweek the character of each tree came out, and it admired itselfreflected in the smooth mirror of the lake. Each morning the managerof this gallery substituted some new picture, distinguished by morebrilliant or harmonious coloring, for the old upon the walls. The wasps came by thousands to my lodge in October, as to winterquarters, and settled on my windows within and on the wallsoverhead, sometimes deterring visitors from entering. Each morning,when they were numbed with cold, I swept some of them out, but I didnot trouble myself much to get rid of them; I even felt complimentedby their regarding my house as a desirable shelter. They nevermolested me seriously, though they bedded with me; and theygradually disappeared, into what crevices I do not know, avoidingwinter and unspeakable cold. Like the wasps, before I finally went into winter quarters inNovember, I used to resort to the northeast side of Walden, whichthe sun, reflected from the pitch pine woods and the stony shore, madethe fireside of the pond; it is so much pleasanter and wholesomer tobe warmed by the sun while you can be, than by an artificial fire. Ithus 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, sothat 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 stillgrowing harder; but this is one of those sayings which men love torepeat whether they are true or not. Such sayings themselves growharder and adhere more firmly with age, and it would take many blowswith a trowel to clean an old wiseacre of them. Many of the villagesof Mesopotamia are built of secondhand bricks of a very goodquality, obtained from the ruins of Babylon, and the cement on them isolder and probably harder still. However that may be, I was struckby the peculiar toughness of the steel which bore so many violentblows without being worn out. As my bricks had been in a chimneybefore, though I did not read the name of Nebuchadnezzar on them, Ipicked out its many fireplace bricks as I could find, to save work andwaste, and I filled the spaces between the bricks about thefireplace with stones from the pond shore, and also made my mortarwith the white sand from the same place. I lingered most about thefireplace, as the most vital part of the house. Indeed, I worked sodeliberately, that though I commenced at the ground in the morning,a course of bricks raised a few inches above the floor served for mypillow at night; yet I did not get a stiff neck for it that Iremember; my stiff neck is of older date. I took a poet to board for afortnight about 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 scourthem by thrusting them into the earth. He shared with me the labors ofcooking. I was pleased to see my work rising so square and solid bydegrees, and reflected, that, if it proceeded slowly, it wascalculated to endure a long time. The chimney is to some extent anindependent structure, standing on the ground, and rising throughthe house to the heavens; even after the house is burned it stillstands sometimes, and its importance and independence are apparent.This was toward the end of summer. It was now November. The north wind had already begun to cool the pond, though it tookmany weeks of steady blowing to accomplish it, it is so deep. When Ibegan to have a fire at evening, before I plastered my house, thechimney carried smoke particularly well, because of the numerouschinks between the boards. Yet I passed some cheerful evenings in thatcool and airy apartment, surrounded by the rough brown boards fullof knots, and rafters with the bark on high overhead. My house neverpleased my eye so much after it was plastered, though I was obliged toconfess that it was more comfortable. Should not every apartment inwhich 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 thanfresco paintings or other the most expensive furniture. I now firstbegan to inhabit my house, I may say, when I began to use it forwarmth as well as shelter. I had got a couple of old fire-dogs to keepthe wood from the hearth, and it did me good to see the soot form onthe back of the chimney which I had built, and I poked the fire withmore right and more satisfaction than usual. My dwelling was small,and I could hardly entertain an echo in it; but it seemed larger forbeing a single apartment and remote from neighbors. All theattractions of a house were concentrated in one room; it waskitchen, chamber, parlor, and keeping-room; and whateversatisfaction parent or child, master or servant, derive from living ina house, I enjoyed it all. Cato says, the master of a family(patremfamilias) must have in his rustic villa "cellam oleariam,vinariam, dolia multa, uti lubeat caritatem expectare, et rei, etvirtuti, et gloriae erit," that is, "an oil and wine cellar, manycasks, so that it may be pleasant to expect hard times; it will be forhis advantage, and virtue, and glory." I had in my cellar a firkinof potatoes, about two quarts of peas with the weevil in them, andon my shelf a little rice, a jug of molasses, and of rye and Indianmeal a peck each. I sometimes dream of a larger and more populous house, standing in agolden age, of enduring materials, and without gingerbread work, whichshall still consist of only one room, a vast, rude, substantial,primitive hall, without ceiling or plastering, with bare rafters andpurlins supporting a sort of lower heaven over one's head-useful tokeep off rain and snow, where the king and queen posts stand out toreceive your homage, when you have done reverence to the prostrateSaturn of an older dynasty on stepping over the sill; a cavernoushouse, wherein you must reach up a torch upon a pole to see theroof; where some may live in the fireplace, some in the recess of awindow, and some on settles, some at one end of the hall, some atanother, and some aloft on rafters with the spiders, if they choose; ahouse which you have got into when you have opened the outside door,and the ceremony is over; where the weary traveller may wash, and eat,and converse, and sleep, without further journey; such a shelter asyou would be glad to reach in a tempestuous night, containing allthe essentials of a house, and nothing for house-keeping; where youcan see all the treasures of the house at one view, and everythinghangs upon its peg, that a man should use; at once kitchen, pantry,parlor, chamber, storehouse, and garret; where you can see sonecessary a thin, as a barrel or a ladder, so convenient a thing asa cupboard, and hear the pot boil, and pay your respects to the firethat cooks your dinner, and the oven that bakes your bread, and thenecessary furniture and utensils are the chief ornaments; where thewashing is not put out, nor the fire, nor the mistress, and perhapsyou are sometimes requested to move from off the trapdoor, when thecook would descend into the cellar, and so learn whether the ground issolid or hollow beneath you without stamping. A house whose insideis as open and manifest as a bird's nest, and you cannot go in atthe front door and out at the back without seeing some of itsinhabitants; where to be a guest is to be presented with the freedomof the house, and not to be carefully excluded from seven eighths ofit, shut up in a particular cell, and told to make yourself at hometherein solitary confinement. Nowadays the host does not admit youto his hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourselfsomewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art of keeping you atthe greatest distance. There is as much secrecy about the cooking asif he had a design to poison you. I am aware that I have been onmany a man's premises, and might have been legally ordered off, butI am not aware that I have been in many men's houses. I might visit inmy old clothes a king and queen who lived simply in such a house asI have described, if I were going their way; but backing out of amodern palace will be all that I shall desire to learn, if ever I amcaught in one. It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would loseall its nerve and degenerate into palaver wholly, our lives pass atsuch remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes arenecessarily so far fetched, through slides and dumbwaiters, as itwere; in other words, the parlor is so far from the kitchen andworkshop. The dinner even is only the parable of a dinner, commonly.As if only the savage dwelt near enough to Nature and Truth toborrow a trope from them. How can the scholar, who dwells away inthe North West Territory or the Isle of Man, tell what isparliamentary in the kitchen? However, only one or two of my guests were ever bold enough tostay and eat a hasty-pudding with me; but when they saw that crisisapproaching they beat a hasty retreat rather, as if it would shake thehouse to its foundations. Nevertheless, it stood through a greatmany hasty-puddings. I did not plaster till it was freezing weather. I brought oversome whiter and cleaner sand for this purpose from the oppositeshore of the pond in a boat, a sort of conveyance which would havetempted me to go much farther if necessary. My house had in themeanwhile been shingled down to the ground on every side. In lathing Iwas pleased to be able to send home each nail with a single blow ofthe hammer, and it was my ambition to transfer the plaster from theboard to the wall neatly and rapidly. I remembered the story of aconceited fellow, who, in fine clothes, was wont to lounge about thevillage once, giving advice to workmen. Venturing one day tosubstitute deeds for words, he turned up his cuffs, seized aplasterer's board, and having loaded his trowel without mishap, with acomplacent look toward the lathing overhead, made a bold gesturethitherward; and straightway, to his complete discomfiture, receivedthe whole contents in his ruffled bosom. I admired anew the economyand convenience of plastering, which so effectually shuts out the coldand takes a handsome finish, and I learned the various casualties towhich the plasterer is liable. I was surprised to see how thirstythe bricks were which drank up all the moisture in my plaster before Ihad smoothed it, and how many pailfuls of water it takes to christen anew hearth. I had the previous winter made a small quantity of lime byburning the shells of the Unio fluviatilis, which our river affords,for the sake of the experiment; so that I knew where my materials camefrom. I might have got good limestone within a mile or two andburned it myself, if I had cared to do so. The pond had in the meanwhile skimmed over in the shadiest andshallowest 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 forexamining the bottom where it is shallow; for you can lie at yourlength on ice only an inch thick, like a skater insect on thesurface of the water, and study the bottom at your leisure, only twoor three inches distant, like a picture behind a glass, and thewater is necessarily always smooth then. There are many furrows in thesand where some creature has travelled about and doubled on itstracks; and, for wrecks, it is strewn with the cases of caddis-wormsmade of minute grains of white quartz. Perhaps these have creasedit, for you find some of their cases in the furrows, though they aredeep and broad for them to make. But the ice itself is the object ofmost interest, though you must improve the earliest opportunity tostudy it. If you examine it closely the morning after it freezes,you find that the greater part of the bubbles, which at first appearedto be within it, are against its under surface, and that more arecontinually rising from the bottom; while the ice is as yetcomparatively solid and dark, that is, you see the water through it.These bubbles are from an eightieth to an eighth of an inch indiameter, very clear and beautiful, and you see your face reflected inthem through the ice. There may be thirty or forty of them to a squareinch. There are also already within the ice narrow oblongperpendicular bubbles about half an inch long, sharp cones with theapex upward; or oftener, if the ice is quite fresh, minute sphericalbubbles one directly above another, like a string of beads. Butthese 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, andthose which broke through carried in air with them, which formedvery large and conspicuous white bubbles beneath. One day when Icame to the same place forty-eight hours afterward, I found that thoselarge bubbles were still perfect, though an inch more of ice hadformed, 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 not now transparent, showing the dark green color of thewater, and the bottom, but opaque and whitish or gray, and thoughtwice as thick was hardly stronger than before, for the air bubbleshad greatly expanded under this heat and run together, and losttheir regularity; they were no longer one directly over another, butoften like silvery coins poured from a bag, one overlapping another,or in thin flakes, as if occupying slight cleavages. The beauty of theice was gone, and it was too late to study the bottom. Being curiousto know what position my great bubbles occupied with regard to the newice, I broke out a cake containing a middling sized one, and turned itbottom upward. The new ice had formed around and under the bubble,so that it was included between the two ices. It was wholly in thelower ice, but close against the upper, and was flattish, or perhapsslightly lenticular, with a rounded edge, a quarter of an inch deep byfour inches in diameter; and I was surprised to find that directlyunder the bubble the ice was melted with great regularity in theform of a saucer reversed, to the height of five eighths of an inch inthe middle, leaving a thin partition there between the water and thebubble, hardly an eighth of an inch thick; and in many places thesmall bubbles in this partition had burst out downward, and probablythere was no ice at all under the largest bubbles, which were a footin diameter. I inferred that the infinite number of minute bubbleswhich I had first seen against the under surface of the ice were nowfrozen in likewise, and that each, in its degree, had operated likea burning-glass on the ice beneath to melt and rot it. These are thelittle air-guns which contribute to make the ice crack and whoop. At length the winter set in good earnest, just as I had finishedplastering, and the wind began to howl around the house as if it hadnot had permission to do so till then. Night after night the geesecame lumbering in the dark with a clangor and a whistling of wings,even after the ground was covered with snow, some to alight in Walden,and some flying low over the woods toward Fair Haven, bound forMexico. Several times, when returning from the village at ten oreleven o'clock at night, I heard the tread of a flock of geese, orelse ducks, on the dry leaves in the woods by a pond-hole behind mydwelling, where they had come up to feed, and the faint honk orquack of their leader as they hurried off. In 1845 Walden frozeentirely over for the first time on the night of the 22d ofDecember, Flint's and other shallower ponds and the river havingbeen frozen ten days or more; in '46, the 16th; in '49, about the31st; and in '50, about the 27th of December; in '52, the 5th ofJanuary; in '53, the 31st of December. The snow had already coveredthe ground since the 25th of November, and surrounded me suddenly withthe scenery of winter. I withdrew yet farther into my shell, andendeavored to keep a bright fire both within my house and within mybreast. My employment out of doors now was to collect the dead wood inthe forest, bringing it in my hands or on my shoulders, or sometimestrailing a dead pine tree under each arm to my shed. An old forestfence which had seen its best days was a great haul for me. Isacrificed it to Vulcan, for it was past serving the god Terminus. Howmuch more interesting an event is that man's supper who has justbeen forth in the snow to hunt, nay, you might say, steal, the fuel tocook it with! His bread and meat are sweet. There are enough fagotsand waste wood of all kinds in the forests of most of our towns tosupport many fires, but which at present warm none, and, some think,hinder the growth of the young wood. There was also the driftwood ofthe pond. In the course of the summer I had discovered a raft of pitchpine logs with the bark on, pinned together by the Irish when therailroad was built. This I hauled up partly on the shore. Aftersoaking two years and then lying high six months it was perfectlysound, though waterlogged past drying. I amused myself one winterday 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 the ice; or I tied several logs together with a birchwithe, and then, with a longer birch or alder which had a book atthe end, dragged them across. Though completely waterlogged and almostas 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 thepitch, 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 thusraised on the borders of the forest," were "considered as greatnuisances by the old forest law, and were severely punished underthe name of purprestures, as tending ad terrorem ferarum- adnocumentum forestae, etc.," to the frightening of the game and thedetriment of the forest. But I was interested in the preservation ofthe venison and the vert more than the hunters or woodchoppers, and asmuch as though I had been the Lord Warden himself; and if any part wasburned, though I burned it myself by accident, I grieved with agrief that lasted longer and was more inconsolable than that of theproprietors; nay, I grieved when it was cut down by the proprietorsthemselves. I would that our farmers when they cut down a forestfelt some of that awe which the old Romans did when they came to thin,or let in the light to, a consecrated grove (lucum conlucare), thatis, would believe that it is sacred to some god. The Roman made anexpiatory offering, and prayed, Whatever god or goddess thou art towhom this grove is sacred, be propitious to me, my family, andchildren, etc. It is remarkable what a value is still put upon wood even in thisage and in this new country, a value more permanent and universal thanthat of gold. After all our discoveries and inventions no man willgo by a pile of wood. It is as precious to us as it was to our Saxonand Norman ancestors. If they made their bows of it, we make ourgun-stocks of it. Michaux, more than thirty years ago, says that theprice of wood for fuel in New York and Philadelphia "nearly equals,and sometimes exceeds, that of the best wood in Paris, though thisimmense capital annually requires more than three hundred thousandcords, and is surrounded to the distance of three hundred miles bycultivated plains." In this town the price of wood rises almoststeadily, and the only question is, how much higher it is to be thisyear than it was the last. Mechanics and tradesmen who come inperson to the forest on no other errand, are sure to attend the woodauction, and even pay a high price for the privilege of gleaning afterthe woodchopper. It is now many years that men have resorted to theforest for fuel and the materials of the arts: the New Englander andthe New Hollander, the Parisian and the Celt, the farmer and RobinHood, Goody Blake and Harry Gill; in most parts of the world theprince and the peasant, the scholar and the savage, equally requirestill 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 of affection. I love tohave mine before my window, and the more chips the better to remind meof my pleasing work. I had an old axe which nobody claimed, with whichby spells in winter days, on the sunny side of the house, I playedabout the stumps which I had got out of my bean-field. As my driverprophesied when I was plowing, they warmed me twice- once while Iwas splitting them, and again when they were on the fire, so that nofuel could give out more heat. As for the axe, I was advised to getthe village blacksmith to "jump" it; but I jumped him, and, puttinga hickory helve from the woods into it, made it do. If it was dull, itwas at least hung true. A few pieces of fat pine were a great treasure. It is interesting toremember how much of this food for fire is still concealed in thebowels of the earth. In previous years I had often gone prospectingover some bare hillside, where a pitch pine wood had formerly stood,and got out the fat pine roots. They are almost indestructible. Stumpsthirty or forty years old, at least, will still be sound at thecore, though the sapwood has all become vegetable mould, as appears bythe scales of the thick bark forming a ring level with the earthfour or five inches distant from the heart. With axe and shovel youexplore this mine, and follow the marrowy store, yellow as beeftallow, or as if you had struck on a vein of gold, deep into theearth. But commonly I kindled my fire with the dry leaves of theforest, which I had stored up in my shed before the snow came. Greenhickory finely split makes the woodchopper's kindlings, when he hasa camp in the woods. Once in a while I got a little of this. Whenthe villagers were lighting their fires beyond the horizon, I too gavenotice to the various wild inhabitants of Walden vale, by a smokystreamer from my chimney, that I was awake. Light-winged Smoke, Icarian bird, Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight, Lark without 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 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, answeredmy purpose better than any other. I sometimes left a good fire whenI 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. Myhouse was not empty though I was gone. It was as if I had left acheerful housekeeper behind. It was I and Fire that lived there; andcommonly my housekeeper proved trustworthy. One day, however, as I wassplitting wood, I thought that I would just look in at the windowand see if the house was not on fire; it was the only time Iremember to have been particularly anxious on this score; so Ilooked and saw that a spark had caught my bed, and I went in andextinguished it when it had burned a place as big as my hand. But myhouse occupied so sunny and sheltered a position, and its roof wasso low, that I could afford to let the fire go out in the middle ofalmost any winter day. The moles nested in my cellar, nibbling every third potato, andmaking a snug bed even there of some hair left after plastering and ofbrown paper; for even the wildest animals love comfort and warmth aswell as man, and they survive the winter only because they are socareful to secure them. Some of my friends spoke as if I was coming tothe woods on purpose to freeze myself. The animal merely makes abed, which he warms with his body, in a sheltered place; but man,having discovered fire, boxes up some air in a spacious apartment, andwarms that, instead of robbing himself, makes that his bed, in whichhe can move about divested of more cumbrous clothing, maintain akind of summer in the midst of winter, and by means of windows evenadmit the light, and with a lamp lengthen out the day. Thus he goesa step or two beyond instinct, and saves a little time for the finearts. Though, when I had been exposed to the rudest blasts a longtime, my whole body began to grow torpid, when I reached the genialatmosphere of my house I soon recovered my faculties and prolongedmy life. But the most luxuriously housed has little to boast of inthis respect, nor need we trouble ourselves to speculate how the humanrace may be at last destroyed. It would be easy to cut their threadsany time with a little sharper blast from the north. We go on datingfrom Cold Fridays and Great Snows; but a little colder Friday, orgreater snow would put a period to man's existence on the globe. The next winter I used a small cooking-stove for economy, since Idid not own the forest; but it did not keep fire so well as the openfireplace. Cooking was then, for the most part, no longer a poetic,but merely a chemic process. It will soon be forgotten, in thesedays of stoves, that we used to roast potatoes in the ashes, after theIndian fashion. 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 atevening, pulifies his thoughts of the dross and earthiness whichthey have accumulated during the day. But I could no longer sit andlook into the fire, and the pertinent words of a poet recurred to mewith new force. "Never, bright flame, may be denied to me Thy dear, life imaging, close sympathy. What but my hopes shot upward 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, 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 flit, Where nothing cheers nor saddens, but a fire Warms feet and hands- nor does to 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 walked, And with us by the unequal light of the old wood fire talked." FORMER INHABITANTS; AND WINTER VISITORS I WEATHERED some merry snow-storms, and spent some cheerful winter evenings by my fireside, while the snow whirled wildly without, and even the hooting of the owl was hushed. For many weeks I met no one in my walks but those who came occasionally to cut wood and sled it to the village. The elements, however, abetted me in making a path through the deepest snow in the woods, for when I had once gone through the wind blew the oak leaves into my tracks, where they lodged, and by absorbing the rays of the sun melted the snow, and so not only made a my bed for my feet, but in the night their dark line was my guide. For human society I was obliged to conjure up the former occupants of these woods. Within the memory of many of my townsmen the road near which my house stands resounded with the laugh and gossip of inhabitants, and the woods which border it were notched and dotted here and there with their little gardens and dwellings, though it was then much more shut in by the forest than now. In some places, within my own remembrance, the pines would scrape both sides of a chaise at once, and women and children who were compelled to go this way to Lincoln alone and on foot did it with fear, and often ran a good part of the distance. Though mainly but a humble route to neighboring villages, or for the woodman's team, it once amused the traveller more than now by its variety, and lingered longer in his memory. Where now firm open fields stretch from the village to the woods, it then ran through a maple swamp on a foundation of logs, the remnants of which, doubtless, still underlie the present dusty highway, from the Stratton, now the Alms-House, Farm, to Brister's Hill. East of my bean-field, across the road, lived Cato Ingraham, slave of Duncan Ingraham, Esquire, gentleman, of Concord village, who built his slave a house, and gave him permission to live in Walden Woods;- Cato, not Uticensis, but Concordiensis. Some say that he was a Guinea Negro. There are a few who remember his little patch among the walnuts, which he let row up till he should be old and need them; but a younger and whiter speculator got them at last. He too, however, occupies an equally narrow house at present. Cato's half-obliterated cellar-hole still remains, though known to few, being concealed from the traveller by a fringe of pines. It is now filled with the smooth sumach (Rhus glabra), and one of the earliest species of goldenrod (Solidago stricta) grows there luxuriantly. Here, by the very corner of my field, still nearer to town, Zilpha, a colored woman, had her little house, where she spun linen for the townsfolk, making the Walden Woods ring with her shrill singing, for she had a loud and notable voice. At length, in the war of 1812, her dwelling was set on fire by English soldiers, prisoners on parole, when she was away, and her cat and dog and hens were all burned up together. She led a hard life, and somewhat inhumane. One old frequenter of these woods remembers, that as he passed her house one noon he heard her muttering to herself over her gurgling pot- "Ye are all bones, bones!" I have seen bricks amid the oak copse there. Down the road, on the right hand, on Brister's Hill, lived Brister Freeman, "a handy Negro," slave of Squire Cummings once-there where grow still the apple trees which Brister planted and tended; large old trees now, but their fruit still wild and ciderish to my taste. Not long since I read his epitaph in the old Lincoln burying-ground, a little on one side, near the unmarked graves of some British grenadiers who fell in the retreat from Concord- where he is styled "Sippio Brister"- Scipio Africanus he had some title to be called- "a man of color," as if he were discolored. It also told me, with staring emphasis, when he died; which was but an indirect way of informing me that he ever lived. With him dwelt Fenda, his hospitable wife, who told fortunes, yet pleasantly-large, round, and black, blacker than any of the children of night, such a dusky orb as never rose on Concord before or since. Farther down the hill, on the left, on the old road in the woods, are marks of some homestead of the Stratton family; whose orchard once covered all the slope of Brister's Hill, but was long since killed out by pitch pines, excepting a few stumps, whose old roots furnish still the wild stocks of many a thrifty village tree. Nearer yet to town, you come to Breed's location, on the other side of the way, just on the edge of the wood; ground famous for the pranks of a demon not distinctly named in old mythology, who has acted a prominent and astounding part in our New England life, and deserves, as much as any mythological character, to have his biography written one day; who first comes in the guise of a friend or hired man, and then robs and murders the whole family- New-England Rum. But history must not yet tell the tragedies enacted here; let time intervene in some measure to assuage and lend an azure tint to them. Here the most indistinct and dubious tradition says that once a tavern stood; the well the same, which tempered the traveller's beverage and refreshed his steed. Here then men saluted one another, and heard and told the news, and went their ways again. Breed's hut was standing only a dozen years ago, though it had long been unoccupied. It was about the size of mine. It was set on fire by mischievous boys, one Election night, if I do not mistake. I lived on the edge of the village then, and had just lost myself over Davenant's "Gondibert," that winter that I labored with a lethargy- which, by the way, I never knew whether to regard as a family complaint, having an uncle who goes to sleep shaving himself, and is obliged to sprout potatoes in a cellar Sundays, in order to keep awake and keep the Sabbath, or as the consequence of my attempt to read Chalmers' collection of English poetry without skipping. It fairly overcame my Nervii. I had just sunk my head on this when the bells rung fire, and in hot haste the engines rolled that way, led by a straggling troop of men and boys, and I among the foremost, for I had leaped the brook. We thought it was far south over the woods- we who had run to fires before- barn, shop, or dwelling-house, or all together. "It's Baker's barn," cried one. "It is the Codman place," affirmed another. And then fresh sparks went up above the wood, as if the roof fell in, and we all shouted "Concord to the rescue!" Wagons shot past with furious speed and crushing loads, bearing, perchance, among the rest, the agent of the Insurance Company, who was bound to go however far; and ever and anon the engine bell tinkled behind, more slow and sure; and rearmost of all, as it was afterward whispered, came they who set the fire and gave the alarm. Thus we kept on like true idealists, rejecting the evidence of our senses, until at a turn in the road we heard the crackling and actually felt the heat of the fire from over the wall, and realized, alas! that we were there. The very nearness of the fire but cooled our ardor. At first we thought to throw a frog-pond on to it; but concluded to let it burn, it was so far gone and so worthless. So we stood round our engine, jostled one another, expressed our sentiments through speaking-trumpets, or in lower tone referred to the great conflagrations which the world has witnessed, including Bascom's shop, and, between ourselves, we thought that, were we there in season with our "tub," and a full frog-pond by, we could turn that threatened last and universal one into another flood. We finally retreated without doing any mischief- returned to sleep and "Gondibert." But as for "Gondibert," I would except that passage in the preface about wit being the soul's powder- "but most of mankind are strangers to wit, as Indians are to powder." It chanced that I walked that way across the fields the following night, about the same hour, and hearing a low moaning at this spot, I drew near in the dark, and discovered the only survivor of the family that I know, the heir of both its virtues and its vices, who alone was interested in this burning, lying on his stomach and looking over the cellar wall at the still smouldering cinders beneath, muttering to himself, as is his wont. He had been working far off in the river meadows all day, and had improved the first moments that he could call his own to visit the home of his fathers and his youth. He gazed into the cellar from all sides and points of view by turns, always lying down to it, as if there was some treasure, which he remembered, concealed between the stones, where there was absolutely nothing but a heap of bricks and ashes. The house being gone, he looked at what there was left. He was soothed by the sympathy which my mere presence, implied, and showed me, as well as the darkness permitted, where the well was covered up; which, thank Heaven, could never be burned; and he groped long about the wall to find the well-sweep which his father had cut and mounted, feeling for the iron hook or staple by which a burden had been fastened to the heavy end- all that he could now cling to- to convince me that it was no common "rider." I felt it, and still remark it almost daily in my walks, for by it hangs the history of a family. Once more, on the left, where are seen the well and lilac bushes by the wall, in the now open field, lived Nutting and Le Grosse. But to return toward Lincoln. Farther in the woods than any of these, where the road approaches nearest to the pond, Wyman the potter squatted, and furnished his townsmen with earthenware, and left descendants to succeed him. Neither were they rich in worldly goods, holding the land by sufferance while they lived; and there often the sheriff came in vain to collect the taxes, and "attached a chip," for form's sake, as I have read in his accounts, there being nothing else that he could lay his hands on. One day in midsummer, when I was hoeing, a man who was carrying a load of pottery to market stopped his horse against my field and inquired concerning Wyman the younger. He had long ago bought a potter's wheel of him, and wished to know what had become of him. I had read of the potter's clay and wheel in Scripture, but it had never occurred to me that the pots we use were not such as had come down unbroken from those days, or grown on trees like gourds somewhere, and I was pleased to hear that so fictile an art was ever practiced in my neighborhood. The last inhabitant of these woods before me was an Irishman, Hugh Quoil (if I have spelt his name with coil enough), who occupied Wyman's tenement- Col. Quoil, he was called. Rumor said that he had been a soldier at Waterloo. If he had lived I should have made him fight his battles over again. His trade here was that of a ditcher. Napoleon went to St. Helena; Quoil came to Walden Woods. All I know of him is tragic. He was a man of manners, like one who had seen the world, and was capable of more civil speech than you could well attend to. He wore a greatcoat in midsummer, being affected with the trembling delirium, and his face was the color of carmine. He died in the road at the foot of Brister's Hill shortly after I came to the woods, so that I have not remembered him as a neighbor. Before his house was pulled down, when his comrades avoided it as "an unlucky castle," I visited it. There lay his old clothes curled up by use, as if they were himself, upon his raised plank bed. His pipe lay broken on the hearth, instead of a bowl broken at the fountain. The last could never have been the symbol of his death, for he confessed to me that, though he had heard of Brister's Spring, he had never seen it; and soiled cards, kings of diamonds, spades, and hearts, were scattered over the floor. One black chicken which the administrator could not catch, black as night and as silent, not even croaking, awaiting Reynard, still went to roost in the next apartment. In the rear there was the dim outline of a garden, which had been planted but had never received its first hoeing, owing to those terrible shaking fits, though it was now harvest time. It was overrun with Roman wormwood and beggar-ticks, which last stuck to my clothes for all fruit. The skin of a woodchuck was freshly stretched upon the back of the house, a trophy of his last Waterloo; but no warm cap or mittens would he want more. Now only a dent in the earth marks the site of these dwellings, with buried cellar stones, and strawberries, raspberries, thimbleberries, hazel-bushes, and sumachs growing in the sunny sward there; some pitch pine or gnarled oak occupies what was the chimney nook, and a sweet-scented black birch, perhaps, waves where the door-stone was. Sometimes the well dent is visible, where once a spring oozed; now dry and tearless grass; or it was covered deep- not to be discovered till some late day- with a flat stone under the sod, when the last of the race departed. What a sorrowful act must that be- the covering up of wells! coincident with the opening of wells of tears. These cellar dents, like deserted fox burrows, old holes, are all that is left where once were the stir and bustle of human life, and "fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute," in some form and dialect or other were by turns discussed. But all I can learn of their conclusions amounts to just this, that "Cato and Brister pulled wool"; which is about as edifying as the history of more famous schools of philosophy. Still grows the vivacious lilac a generation after the door and lintel and the sill are gone, unfolding its sweet-scented flowers each spring, to be plucked by the musing traveller; planted and tended once by children's hands, hi front-yard plots- now standing by wallsides in retired pastures, and giving place to new- rising forests;- the last of that stirp, sole survivor of that family. Little did the dusky children think that the puny slip with its two eyes only, which they stuck in the ground in the shadow of the house and daily watered, would root itself so, and outlive them, and house itself in the rear that shaded it, and grown man's garden and orchard, and tell their story faintly to the lone wanderer a half-century after they had grown up and died- blossoming as fair, and smelling as sweet, as in that first spring. I mark its still tender, civil, cheerful lilac colors. But this small village, germ of something more, why did it fail while Concord keeps its ground? Were there no natural advantages- no water privileges, forsooth? Ay, the deep Walden Pond and cool Brister's Spring- privilege to drink long and healthy draughts at these, all unimproved by these men but to dilute their glass. They were universally a thirsty race. Might not the basket, stable-broom, mat-making, corn-parching, linen-spinning, and pottery business have thrived here, making the wilderness to blossom like the rose, and a numerous posterity have inherited the land of their fathers? The sterile soil would at least have been proof against a lowland degeneracy. Alas! how little does the memory of these human inhabitants enhance the beauty of the landscape! Again, perhaps, Nature will try, with me for a first settler, and my house raised last spring to be the oldest in the hamlet. I am not aware that any man has ever built on the spot which I occupy. Deliver me from a city built on the site of a more ancient city, whose materials are ruins, whose gardens cemeteries. The soil is blanched and accursed there, and before that becomes necessary the earth itself will be destroyed. With such reminiscences I repeopled the woods and lulled myself asleep. At this season I seldom had a visitor. When the snow lay deepest no wanderer ventured near my house for a week or fortnight at a time, but there I lived as snug as a meadow mouse, or as cattle and poultry which are said to have survived for a long time buried in drifts, even without food; or like that early settler's family in the town of Sutton, in this State, whose cottage was completely covered by the great snow of 1717 when he was absent, and an Indian found it only by the hole which the chimney's breath made in the drift, and so relieved the family. But no friendly Indian concerned himself about me; nor needed he, for the master of the house was at home. The Great Snow! How cheerful it is to hear of! When the farmers could not get to the woods and swamps with their teams, and were obliged to cut down the shade trees before their houses, and, when the crust was harder, cut off the trees in the swamps, ten feet from the ground, as it appeared the next spring. In the deepest snows, the path which I used from the highway to my house, about half a mile long, might have been represented by a meandering dotted line, with wide intervals between the dots. For a week of even weather I took exactly the same number of steps, and of the same length, coming and going, stepping deliberately and with the precision of a pair of dividers in my own deep tracks- to such routine the winter reduces us- yet often they were filled with heaven's own blue. But no weather interfered fatally with my walks, or rather my going abroad, for I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines; when the ice and snow causing their limbs to droop, and so sharpening their tops, had changed the pines into fir trees; wading to the tops of the highest bills when the show was nearly two feet deep on a level, and shaking down another snow-storm on my head at every step; or sometimes creeping and floundering thither on my hands and knees, when the hunters had gone into winter quarters. One afternoon I amused myself by watching a barred owl (Strix nebulosa) sitting on one of the lower dead limbs of a white pine, close to the trunk, in broad daylight, I standing within a rod of him. He could hear me when I moved and cronched the snow with my feet, but could not plainly see me. When I made most noise he would stretch out his neck, and erect his neck feathers, and open his eyes wide; but their lids soon fell again, and he began to nod. I too felt a slumberous influence after watching him half an hour, as he sat thus with his eyes half open, like a cat, winged brother of the cat. There was only a narrow slit left between their lids, by which be preserved a pennisular relation to me; thus, with half-shut eyes, looking out from the land of dreams, and endeavoring to realize me, vague object or mote that interrupted his visions. At length, on some louder noise or my nearer approach, he would grow uneasy and sluggishly turn about on his perch, as if impatient at having his dreams disturbed; and when he launched himself off and flapped through the pines, spreading his wings to unexpected breadth, I could not hear the slightest sound from them. Thus, guided amid the pine boughs rather by a delicate sense of their neighborhood than by sight, feeling his twilight way, as it were, with his sensitive pinions, he found a new perch, where he might in peace await the dawning of his day. As I walked over the long causeway made for the railroad through the meadows, I encountered many a blustering and nipping wind, for nowhere has it freer play; and when the frost had smitten me on one cheek, heathen as I was, I turned to it the other also. Nor was it much better by the carriage road from Brister's Hill. For I came to town still, like a friendly Indian, when the contents of the broad open fields were all piled up between the walls of the Walden road, and half an hour sufficed to obliterate the tracks of the last traveller. And when I returned new drifts would have formed, through which I floundered, where the busy northwest wind had been depositing the powdery snow round a sharp angle in the road, and not a rabbit's track, nor even the fine print, the small type, of a meadow mouse was to be seen. Yet I rarely failed to find, even in midwinter, some warm and springly swamp where the grass and the skunk-cabbage still put forth with perennial verdure, and some hardier bird occasionally awaited the return of spring. Sometimes, notwithstanding the snow, when I returned from my walk at evening I crossed the deep tracks of a woodchopper leading from my door, and found his pile of whittlings on the hearth, and my house filled with the odor of his pipe. Or on a Sunday afternoon, if I chanced to be at home, I heard the cronching of the snow made by the step of a long-headed farmer, who from far through the woods sought my house, to have a social "crack"; one of the few of his vocation who are "men on their farms"; who donned a frock instead of a professor's gown, and is as ready to extract the moral out of church or state as to haul a load of manure from his barn-yard. We talked of rude and simple times, when men sat about large fires in cold, bracing weather, with clear heads; and when other dessert failed, we tried our teeth on many a nut which wise squirrels have long since abandoned, for those which have the thickest shells are commonly empty. The one who came from farthest to my lodge, through deepest snows and most dismal tempests, was a poet. A farmer, a hunter, a soldier, a reporter, even a philosopher, may be daunted; but nothing can deter a poet, for he is actuated by pure love. Who can predict his comings and goings? His business calls him out at all hours, even when doctors sleep. We made that small house ring with boisterous mirth and resound with the murmur of much sober talk, making amends then to Walden vale for the long silences. Broadway was still and deserted in comparison. At suitable intervals there were regular salutes of laughter, which might have been referred indifferently to the last-uttered or the forth-coming jest. We made many a "bran new" theory of life over a thin dish of gruel, which combined the advantages of conviviality with the clear-headedness which philosophy requires. I should not forget that during my last winter at the pond there was another welcome visitor, who at one time came through the village, through snow and rain and darkness, till he saw my lamp through the trees, and shared with me some long winter evenings. One of the last of the philosophers- Connecticut gave him to the world- he peddled first her wares, afterwards, as he declares, his brains. These he peddles still, prompting God and disgracing man, bearing for fruit his brain only, like the nut its kernel. I think that he must be the man of the most faith of any alive. His words and attitude always suppose a better state of things than other men are acquainted with, and he will be the last man to be disappointed as the ages revolve. He has no venture in the present. But though comparatively disregarded now, when his day comes, laws unsuspected by most will take effect, and masters of families and rulers will come to him for advice. pre> "How blind that cannot see serenity!" A true friend of man; almost the only friend of human progress. An Old Mortality, say rather an Immortality, with unwearied patience and faith making plain the image engraven in men's bodies, the God of whom they are but defaced and leaning monuments. With his hospitable intellect he embraces children, beggars, insane, and scholars, and entertains the thought of all, adding to it commonly some breadth and elegance. I think that he should keep a caravansary on the world's highway, where philosophers of all nations might put up, and on his sign should be printed, "Entertainment for man, but not for his beast. Enter ye that have leisure and a quiet mind, who earnestly seek the right road." He is perhaps the sanest man and has the fewest crotchets of any I chance to know; the same yesterday and tomorrow. Of yore we had sauntered and talked, and effectually put the world behind us; for he was pledged to no institution in it, freeborn, ingenuus. Whichever way we turned, it seemed that the heavens and the earth had met together, since he enhanced the beauty of the landscape. A blue-robed man, whose fittest roof is the overarching sky which reflects his serenity. I do not see how he can ever die; Nature cannot spare him. Having each some shingles of thought well dried, we sat and whittled them, trying our knives, and admiring the clear yellowish grain of the pumpkin pine. We waded so gently and reverently, or we pulled together so smoothly, that the fishes of thought were not seared from the stream, nor feared any angler on the bank, but came and went grandly, like the clouds which float through the western sky, and the mother-o'-pearl flocks which sometimes form and dissolve there. There we worked, revising mythology, rounding a fable here and there, and building castles in the air for which earth offered no worthy foundation. Great Looker! Great Expecter! to converse with whom was a New England Night's Entertainment. Ah! such discourse we had, hermit and philosopher, and the old settler I have spoken of- we three- it expanded and racked my little house; I should not dare to say how many pounds' weight there was above the atmospheric pressure on every circular inch; it opened its seams so that they had to be calked with much dulness thereafter to stop the consequent leak;- but I had enough of that kind of oakum already picked. There was one other with whom I had "solid seasons," long to be remembered, at his house in the village, and who looked in upon me from time to time; but I had no more for society there. There too, as everywhere, I sometimes expected the Visitor who never comes. The Vishnu Purana says, "The house-holder is to remain at eventide in his courtyard as long as it takes to milk a cow, or longer if he pleases, to await the arrival of a guest." I often performed this duty of hospitality, waited long enough to milk a whole herd of cows, but did not see the man approaching from the town. WINTER ANIMALS WHEN THE ponds were firmly frozen, they afforded not only new and shorter routes to many points, but new views from their surfaces of the familiar landscape around them. When I crossed Flint's Pond, after it was covered with snow, though I had often paddled about and skated over it, it was so unexpectedly wide and so strange that I could think of nothing but Baffin's Bay. The Lincoln hills rose up around me at the extremity of a snowy plain, in which I did not remember to have stood before; and the fishermen, at an indeterminable distance over the ice, moving slowly about with their wolfish dogs, passed for sealers, or Esquimaux, or in misty weather loomed like fabulous creatures, and I did not know whether they were giants or pygmies. I took this course when I went to lecture in Lincoln in the evening, travelling in no road and passing no house between my own hut and the lecture room. In Goose Pond, which lay in my way, a colony of muskrats dwelt, and raised their cabins high above the ice, though none could be seen abroad when I crossed it. Walden, being like the rest usually bare of snow, or with only shallow and interrupted drifts on it, was my yard where I could walk freely when the snow was nearly two feet deep on a level elsewhere and the villagers were confined to their streets. There, far from the village street, and except at very long intervals, from the jingle of sleigh-bells, I slid and skated, as in a vast moose-yard well trodden, overhung by oak woods and solemn pines bent down with snow or bristling with icicles. For sounds in winter nights, and often in winter days, I heard the forlorn but melodious note of a hooting owl indefinitely far; such a sound as the frozen earth would yield if struck with a suitable plectrum, the very lingua vernacula of Walden Wood, and quite familiar to me at last, though I never saw the bird while it was making it. I seldom opened my door in a winter evening without hearing it; Hoo hoo hoo, hoorer, hoo, sounded sonorously, and the first three syllables accented somewhat like how der do; or sometimes hoo, hoo only. One night in the beginning of winter, before the pond froze over, about nine o'clock, I was startled by the loud honking of a goose, and, stepping to the door, heard the sound of their wings like a tempest in the woods as they flew low over my house. They passed over the pond toward Fair Haven, seemingly deterred from settling by my light, their commodore honking all the while with a regular beat. Suddenly an unmistakable cat owl from very near me, with the most harsh and tremendous voice I ever heard from any inhabitant of the woods, responded at regular intervals to the goose, as if determined to expose and disgrace this intruder from Hudson's Bay by exhibiting a greater compass and volume of voice in a native, and boo-hoo him out of Concord horizon. What do you mean by alarming the citadel at this time of night consecrated to me? Do you think I am ever caught napping at such an hour, and that I have not got lungs and a larynx as well as yourself? Boo-hoo, boo-hoo, boo-hoo! It was one of the most thrilling discords I ever heard. And yet, if you had a discriminating ear, there were in it the elements of a concord such as these plains never saw nor heard. I also heard the whooping of the ice in the pond, my great bed-fellow in that part of Concord, as if it were restless in its bed and would fain turn over, were troubled with flatulency and had dreams; or I was waked by the cracking of the ground by the frost, as if some one had driven a team against my door, and in the morning would find a crack in the earth a quarter of a mile long and a third of an inch wide. Sometimes I heard the foxes as they ranged over the snow-crust, in moonlight nights, in search of a partridge or other game, barking raggedly and demoniacally like forest dogs, as if laboring with some anxiety, or seeking expression, struggling for light and to be dogs outright and run freely in the streets; for if we take the ages into our account, may there not be a civilization going on among brutes as well as men? They seemed to me to be rudimental, burrowing men, still standing on their defence, awaiting their transformation. Sometimes one came near to my window, attracted by my light, barked a vulpine curse at me, and then retreated. Usually the red squirrel (Sciurus Hudsonius) waked me in the dawn, coursing over the roof and up and down the sides of the house, as if sent out of the woods for this purpose. In the course of the winter I threw out half a bushel of ears of sweet corn, which had not got ripe, on to the snow-crust by my door, and was amused by watching the motions of the various animals which were baited by it. In the twilight and the night the rabbits came regularly and made a hearty meal. All day long the red squirrels came and went, and afforded me much entertainment by their manoeuvres. One would approach at first warily through the shrub oaks, running over the snow-crust by fits and starts like a leaf blown by the wind, now a few paces this way, with wonderful speed and waste of energy, making inconceivable haste with his "trotters," as if it were for a wager, and now as many paces that way, but never getting on more than half a rod at a time; and then suddenly pausing with a ludicrous expression and a gratuitous somerset, as if all the eyes in the universe were eyed on him- for all the motions of a squirrel, even in the most solitary recesses of the forest, imply spectators as much as those of a dancing girl- wasting more time in delay and circumspection than would have sufficed to walk the whole distance- I never saw one walk- and then suddenly, before you could say Jack Robinson, he would be in the top of a young pitch pine, winding up his clock and chiding all imaginary spectators, soliloquizing and talking to all the universe at the same time- for no reason that I could ever detect, or he himself was aware of, I suspect. At length he would reach the corn, and selecting a suitable ear, frisk about in the same uncertain trigonometrical way to the topmost stick of my wood-pile, before my window, where he looked me in the face, and there sit for hours, supplying himself with a new ear from time to time, nibbling at first voraciously and throwing the half-naked cobs about; till at length he grew more dainty still and played with his food, tasting only the inside of the kernel, and the ear, which was held balanced over the stick by one paw, slipped from his careless grasp and fell to the ground, when he would look over at it with a ludicrous expression of uncertainty, as if suspecting that it had life, with a mind not made up whether to get it again, or a new one, or be off; now thinking of corn, then listening to hear what was in the wind. So the little impudent fellow would waste many an ear in a forenoon; till at last, seizing some longer and plumper one, considerably bigger than himself, and skilfully balancing it, he would set out with it to the woods, like a tiger with a buffalo, by the same zig-zag course and frequent pauses, scratching along with it as if it were too heavy for him and falling all the while, making its fall a diagonal between a perpendicular and horizontal, being determined to put it through at any rate;- a singularly frivolous and whimsical fellow;- and so he would get off with it to where he lived, perhaps carry it to the top of a pine tree forty or fifty rods distant, and I would afterwards find the cobs strewn about the woods in various directions. At length the jays arrive, whose discordant screams were heard long before, as they were warily making their approach an eighth of a mile off, and in a stealthy and sneaking manner they flit from tree to tree, nearer and nearer, and pick up the kernels which the squirrels have dropped. Then, sitting on a pitch pine bough, they attempt to swallow in their haste a kernel which is too big for their throats and chokes them; and after great labor they disgorge it, and spend an hour in the endeavor to crack it by repeated blows with their bills. They were manifestly thieves, and I had not much respect for them; but the squirrels, though at first shy, went to work as if they were taking what was their own. Meanwhile also came the chickadees in flocks, which, picking up the crumbs the squirrels had dropped, flew to the nearest twig and, placing them under their claws, hammered away at them with their little bills, as if it were an insect in the bark, till they were sufficiently reduced for their slender throats. A little flock of these titmice came daily to pick a dinner out of my woodpile, or the crumbs at my door, with faint flitting lisping notes, like the tinkling of icicles in the grass, or else with sprightly day day day, or more rarely, in springlike days, a wiry summery phebe from the woodside. They were so familiar that at length one alighted on an armful of wood which I was carrying in, and pecked at the sticks without fear. I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn. The squirrels also grew at last to be quite familiar, and occasionally stepped upon my shoe, when that was the nearest way. When the ground was not yet quite covered, and again near the end of winter, when the snow was melted on my south hillside and about my wood-pile, the partridges came out of the woods morning and evening to feed there. Whichever side you walk in the woods the partridge bursts away on whirring wings, jarring the snow from the dry leaves and twigs on high, which comes sifting down in the sunbeams like golden dust, for this brave bird is not to be scared by winter. It is frequently covered up by drifts, and, it is said, "sometimes plunges from on wing into the soft snow, where it remains concealed for a day or two." I used to start them in the open land also, where they had come out of the woods at sunset to "bud" the wild apple trees. They will come regularly every evening to particular trees, where the cunning sportsman lies in wait for them, and the distant orchards next the woods suffer thus not a little. I am glad that the partridge gets fed, at any rate. It is Nature's own bird which lives on buds and diet-drink. In dark winter mornings, or in short winter afternoons, I sometimes heard a pack of hounds threading all the woods with hounding cry and yelp, unable to resist the instinct of the chase, and the note of the hunting-horn at intervals, proving that man was in the rear. The woods ring again, and yet no fox bursts forth on to the open level of the pond, nor following pack pursuing their Actaeon. And perhaps at evening I see the hunters returning with a single brush trailing from their sleigh for a trophy, seeking their inn. They tell me that if the fox would remain in the bosom of the frozen earth he would be safe, or if be would run in a straight line away no foxhound could overtake him; but, having left his pursuers far behind, he stops to rest and listen till they come up, and when he runs he circles round to his old haunts, where the hunters await him. Sometimes, however, he will run upon a wall many rods, and then leap off far to one side, and he appears to know that water will not retain his scent. A hunter told me that he once saw a fox pursued by hounds burst out on to Walden when the ice was covered with shallow puddles, run part way across, and then return to the same shore. Ere long the hounds arrived, but here they lost the scent. Sometimes a pack hunting by themselves would pass my door, and circle round my house, and yelp and hound without regarding me, as if afflicted by a species of madness, so that nothing could divert them from the pursuit. Thus they circle until they fall upon the recent trail of a fox, for a wise hound will forsake everything else for this. One day a man came to my hut from Lexington to inquire after his hound that made a large track, and had been hunting for a week by himself. But I fear that he was not the wiser for all I told him, for every time I attempted to answer his questions he interrupted me by asking, "What do you do here?" He had lost a dog, but found a man. One old hunter who has a dry tongue, who used to come to bathe in Walden once every year when the water was warmest, and at such times looked in upon me, told me that many years ago he took his gun one afternoon and went out for a cruise in Walden Wood; and as he walked the Wayland road he heard the cry of hounds approaching, and ere long a fox leaped the wall into the road, and as quick as thought leaped the other wall out of the road, and his swift bullet had not touched him. Some way behind came an old hound and her three pups in full pursuit, hunting on their own account, and disappeared again in the woods. Late in the afternoon, as he was resting in the thick woods south of Walden, he heard the voice of the hounds far over toward Fair Haven still pursuing the fox; and on they came, their hounding cry which made all the woods ring sounding nearer and nearer, now from Well Meadow, now from the Baker Farm. For a long time he stood still and listened to their music, so sweet to a hunter's ear, when suddenly the fox appeared, threading the solemn aisles with an easy coursing pace, whose sound was concealed by a sympathetic rustle of the leaves, swift and still, keeping the round, leaving his pursuers far behind; and, leaping upon a rock amid the woods, he sat erect and listening, with his back to the hunter. For a moment compassion restrained the latter's arm; but that was a short-lived mood, and as quick as thought can follow thought his piece was levelled, and whang!- the fox, rolling over the rock, lay dead on the ground. The hunter still kept his place and listened to the hounds. Still on they came, and now the near woods resounded through all their aisles with their demoniac cry. At length the old hound burst into view with muzzle to the ground, and snapping the air as if possessed, and ran directly to the rock; but, spying the dead fox, she suddenly ceased her hounding as if struck dumb with amazement, and walked round and round him in silence; and one by one her pups arrived, and, like their mother, were sobered into silence by the mystery. Then the hunter came forward and stood in their midst, and the mystery was solved. They waited in silence while he skinned the fox, then followed the brush a while, and at length turned off into the woods again. That evening a Weston squire came to the Concord hunter's cottage to inquire for his hounds, and told how for a week they had been hunting on their own account from Weston woods. The Concord hunter told him what he knew and offered him the skin; but the other declined it and departed. He did not find his hounds that night, but the next day learned that they had crossed the river and put up at a farmhouse for the night, whence, having been well fed, they took their departure early in the morning. The hunter who told me this could remember one Sam Nutting, who used to hunt bears on Fair Haven Ledges, and exchange their skins for rum in Concord village; who told him, even, that he had seen a moose there. Nutting had a famous foxhound named Burgoyne- he pronounced it Bugine- which my informant used to borrow. In the "Wast Book" of an old trader of this town, who was also a captain, town-clerk, and representative, I find the following entry. Jan. 18th, 1742-3, "John Melven Cr. by 1 Grey Fox 0-2-3"; they are not now found here; and in his ledger, Feb, 7th, 1743, Hezekiah Stratton has credit "by 1/2 a Catt skin 0-1-4 1/2"; of course, a wild-cat, for Stratton was a sergeant in the old French war, and would not have got credit for hunting less noble game. Credit is given for deerskins also, and they were daily sold. One man still preserves the horns of the last deer that was killed in this vicinity, and another has told me the particulars of the hunt in which his uncle was engaged. The hunters were formerly a numerous and merry crew here. I remember well one gaunt Nimrod who would catch up a leaf by the roadside and play a strain on it wilder and more melodious, if my memory serves me, than any hunting-horn. At midnight, when there was a moon, I sometimes met with hounds in my path prowling about the woods, which would skulk out of my way, as if afraid, and stand silent amid the bushes till I had passed. Squirrels and wild mice disputed for my store of nuts. There were scores of pitch pines around my house, from one to four inches in diameter, which had been gnawed by mice the previous winter- a Norwegian winter for them, for the snow lay long and deep, and they were obliged to mix a large proportion of pine bark with their other diet. These trees were alive and apparently flourishing at midsummer, and many of them had grown a foot, though completely girdled; but after another winter such were without exception dead. It is remarkable that a single mouse should thus be allowed a whole pine tree for its dinner, gnawing round instead of up and down it; but perhaps it is necessary in order to thin these trees, which are wont to grow up densely. The hares (Lepus Americanus) were very familiar. One had her form under my house all winter, separated from me only by the flooring, and she startled me each morning by her hasty departure when I began to stir- thump, thump, thump, striking her head against the floor timbers in her hurry. They used to come round my door at dusk to nibble the potato parings which I had thrown out, and were so nearly the color of the round that they could hardly be distinguished when still. Sometimes in the twilight I alternately lost and recovered sight of one sitting motionless under my window. When I opened my door in the evening, off they would go with a squeak and a bounce. Near at hand they only excited my pity. One evening one sat by my door two paces from me, at first trembling with fear, yet unwilling to move; a poor wee thing, lean and bony, with ragged ears and sharp nose, scant tail and slender paws. It looked as if Nature no longer contained the breed of nobler bloods, but stood on her last toes. Its large eyes appeared young and unhealthy, almost dropsical. I took a step, and lo, away it scud with an elastic spring over the snow-crust, straightening its body and its limbs into graceful length, and soon put the forest between me and itself- the wild free venison, assenting its vigor and the dignity of Nature. Not without reason was its slenderness. Such then was its nature. (Lepus, levipes, light-foot, some think.) What is a country without rabbits and partridges? They are among the most simple and indigenous animal products; ancient and venerable families known to antiquity as to modern times; of the very hue and substance of Nature, nearest allied to leaves and to the ground- and to one another; it is either winged or it is legged. It is hardly as if you had seen a wild creature when a rabbit or a partridge bursts away, only a natural one, as much to be expected as rustling leaves. The partridge and the rabbit are still sure to thrive, like true natives of the soil, whatever revolutions occur. If the forest is cut off, the sprouts and bushes which spring up afford them concealment, and they become more numerous than ever. That must be a poor country indeed that does not support a hare. Our woods teem with them both, and around every swamp may be seen the partridge or rabbit walk, beset with twiggy fences and horse-hair snares, which some cow-boy tends. THE POND IN WINTER. AFTER A still winter night I awoke with the impression that somequestion had been put to me, which I had been endeavoring in vain toanswer in my sleep, as what- how- when- where? But there was dawningNature, in whom all creatures live, looking in at my broad windowswith serene and satisfied face, and no question on her lips. I awoketo an answered question, to Nature and daylight. The snow lying deepon the earth dotted with young pines, and the very slope of the hillon which my house is placed, seemed to say, Forward! Nature puts noquestion and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago takenher resolution. "O Prince, our eyes contemplate with admiration andtransmit to the soul the wonderful and varied spectacle of thisuniverse. The night veils without doubt a part of this gloriouscreation; but day comes to reveal to us this great work, which extendsfrom earth even into the plains of the ether." Then to my morning work. First I take an axe and pail and go insearch of water, if that be not a dream. After a cold and snowynight it needed a divining-rod to find it. Every winter the liquid andtrembling surface of the pond, which was so sensitive to every breath,and reflected every light and shadow, becomes solid to the depth ofa foot or a foot and a half, so that it will support the heaviestteams, and perchance the snow covers it to an equal depth, and it isnot to be distinguished from any level field. Like the marmots inthe surrounding hills, it closes its eyelids and becomes dormant forthree months or more. Standing on the snow-covered plain, as if in apasture amid the hills, I cut my way first through a foot of snow, andthen a foot of ice, and open a window under my feet, where, kneelingto drink, I look down into the quiet parlor of the fishes, pervaded bya softened light as through a window of ground glass, with itsbright sanded floor the same as in summer; there a perennialwaveless serenity reigns as in the amber twilight sky, correspondingto the cool and even temperament of the inhabitants. Heaven is underour feet is well as over our heads. Early in the morning, while all things are crisp with frost, mencome with fishing-reels and slender lunch, and let down their finelines through the snowy field to take pickerel and perch; wild men,who instinctively follow other fashions and trust other authoritiesthan their townsmen, and by their goings and comings stitch townstogether in parts where else they would be ripped. They sit and eattheir luncheon in stout fear- naughts on the dry oak leaves on theshore, as wise in natural lore as the citizen is in artificial. Theynever consulted with books, and know and can tell much less thanthey have done. The things which they practice are said not yet tobe known. Here is one fishing for pickerel with grown perch forbait. You look into his pail with wonder as into a summer pond, asif he kept summer locked up at home, or knew where she hadretreated. How, pray, did he get these in midwinter? Oh, he gotworms out of rotten logs since the ground froze, and so he caughtthem. His life itself passes deeper in nature than the studies ofthe naturalist penetrate; himself a subject for the naturalist. Thelatter raises the moss and bark gently with his knife in search ofinsects; the former lays open logs to their core with his axe, andmoss and bark fly far and wide. He gets his living by barking trees.Such a man has some right to fish, and I love to see nature carriedout in him. The perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallowsthe perch, and the fisher-man swallows the pickerel; and so all thechinks in the scale of being are filled. When I strolled around the pond in misty weather I was sometimesamused by the primitive mode which some ruder fisher-man hadadopted. He would perhaps have placed alder branches over the narrowholes in the ice, which were four or five rods apart and an equaldistance from the shore, and having fastened the end of the line toa stick to prevent its being pulled through, have passed the slackline over a twig of the alder, a foot or more above the ice, andtied a dry oak leaf to it, which, being pulled down, would show whenhe had a bite. These alders loomed through the mist at regularintervals as you walked half way round the pond. Ah, the pickerel of Walden! when I see them lying on the ice, orin the well which the fisherman cuts in the ice, making a littlehole to admit the water, I am always surprised by their rare beauty,as if they were fabulous fishes, they are so foreign to the streets,even to the woods, foreign as Arabia to our Concord life. They possessa quite dazzling and transcendent beauty which separates them by awide interval from the cadaverous cod and haddock whose fame istrumpeted in our streets. They are not green like the pines, norgray like the stones, nor blue like the sky; but they have, to myeyes, if possible, yet rarer colors, like flowers and precious stones,as if they were the pearls, the animalized nuclei or crystals of theWalden water. They, of course, are Walden all over and all through;are themselves small Waldens in the animal kingdom, Waldenses. It issurprising that they are caught here- that in this deep andcapacious spring, far beneath the rattling teams and chaises andtinkling sleighs that travel the Walden road, this great gold andemerald fish swims. I never chanced to see its kind in any market;it would be the cynosure of all eyes there. Easily, with a fewconvulsive quirks, they give up their watery ghosts, like a mortaltranslated before his time to the thin air of heaven. As I was desirous to recover the long lost bottom of Walden Pond,I surveyed it carefully, before the ice broke up, early in '46, withcompass and chain and sounding line. There have been many stories toldabout the bottom, or rather no bottom, of this pond, which certainlyhad no foundation for themselves. It is remarkable how long men willbelieve in the bottomlessness of a pond without taking the troubleto sound it. I have visited two such Bottomless Ponds in one walk inthis neighborhood. Many have believed that Walden reached quitethrough to the other side of the globe. Some who have lain flat on theice for a long time, looking down through the illusive medium,perchance with watery eyes into the bargain, and driven to hastyconclusions by the fear of catching cold in their breasts, have seenvast holes "into which a load of hay might be drived," if there wereanybody to drive it, the undoubted source of the Styx and entranceto the Infernal Regions from these parts. Others have gone down fromthe village with a "fifty-six" and a wagon load of inch rope, butyet have failed to find any bottom; for while the "fifty-six" wasresting by the way, they were paying out the rope in the vainattempt to fathom their truly immeasurable capacity formarvellousness. But I can assure my readers that Walden has areasonably tight bottom at a not unreasonable, though at an unusual,depth. I fathomed it easily with a cod-line and a stone weighing abouta pound and a half, and could tell accurately when the stone leftthe bottom, by having to pull so much harder before the water gotunderneath to help me. The greatest depth was exactly one hundredand two feet; to which may be added the five feet which it has risensince, making one hundred and seven. This is a remarkable depth for sosmall an area; yet not an inch of it can be spared by the imagination.What if all ponds were shallow? Would it not react on the minds ofmen? I am thankful that this pond was made deep and pure for a symbol.While men believe in the infinite some ponds will be thought to bebottomless. A factory-owner, bearing what depth I had found, thought that itcould not be true, for, judging from his acquaintance with dams,sand would not lie at so steep an angle. But the deepest ponds are notso deep in proportion to their area as most suppose, and, ifdrained, would not leave very remarkable valleys. They are not likecups between the hills; for this one, which is so unusually deep forits area, appears in a vertical section through its centre notdeeper than a shallow plate. Most ponds, emptied, would leave a meadowno more hollow than we frequently see. William Gilpin, who is soadmirable in all that relates to landscapes, and usually so correct,standing at the head of Loch Fyne, in Scotland, which he describesas "a bay of salt water, sixty or seventy fathoms deep, four milesin breadth, and about fifty miles long, surrounded by mountains,observes, "If we could have seen it immediately after the diluviancrash, or whatever convulsion of nature occasioned it, before thewaters gushed in, what a horrid chasm must it have appeared! "So high as heaved the tumid hills, so low Down sunk a hollow bottom broad and deep, Capacious bed of waters." But if, using the shortest diameter of Loch Fyne, we apply theseproportions to Walden, which, as we have seen, appears already in avertical section only like a shallow plate, it will appear fourtimes as shallow. So much for the increased horrors of the chasm ofLoch Fyne when emptied. No doubt many a smiling valley with itsstretching cornfields occupies exactly such a "horrid chasm," fromwhich the waters have receded, though it requires the insight andthe far sight of the geologist to convince the unsuspectinginhabitants of this fact. Often an inquisitive eye may detect theshores of a primitive lake in the low horizon hills, and no subsequentelevation of the plain have been necessary to conceal their history.But it is easiest, as they who work on the highways know, to findthe hollows by the puddles after a shower. The amount of it is, theimagination, give it the least license, dives deeper and soarshigher than Nature goes. So, probably, the depth of the ocean willbe found to be very inconsiderable compared with its breadth. As I sounded through the ice I could determine the shape of thebottom with greater accuracy than is possible in surveying harborswhich do not freeze over, and I was surprised at its generalregularity. In the deepest part there are several acres more levelthan almost any field which is exposed to the sun, wind, and plow.In one instance, on a line arbitrarily chosen, the depth did notvary more than one foot in thirty rods; and generally, near themiddle, I could calculate the variation for each one hundred feet inany direction beforehand within three or four inches. Some areaccustomed to speak of deep and dangerous holes even in quiet sandyponds like this, but the effect of water under these circumstancesis to level all inequalities. The regularity of the bottom and itsconformity to the shores and the range of the neighboring hills wereso perfect that a distant promontory betrayed itself in thesoundings quite across the pond, and its direction could be determinedby observing the opposite shore. Cape becomes bar, and plain shoal,and valley and gorge deep water and channel. When I had mapped the pond by the scale of ten rods to an inch,and put down the soundings, more than a hundred in all, I observedthis remarkable coincidence. Having noticed that the number indicatingthe greatest depth was apparently in the centre of the map, I laid arule on the map lengthwise, and then breadthwise, and found, to mysurprise, that the line of greatest length intersected the line ofgreatest breadth exactly at the point of greatest depth,notwithstanding that the middle is so nearly level, the outline of thepond far from regular, and the extreme length and breadth were gotby measuring into the coves; and I said to myself, Who knows butthis hint would conduct to the deepest part of the ocean as well as ofa pond or puddle? Is not this the rule also for the height ofmountains, regarded as the opposite of valleys? We know that a hill isnot highest at its narrowest part. Of five coves, three, or all which had been sounded, were observedto have a bar quite across their mouths and deeper water within, sothat the bay tended to be an expansion of water within the land notonly horizontally but vertically, and to form a basin or independentpond, the direction of the two capes showing the course of the bar.Every harbor on the sea-coast, also, has its bar at its entrance. Inproportion as the mouth of the cove was wider compared with itslength, the water over the bar was deeper compared with that in thebasin. Given, then, the length and breadth of the cove, and thecharacter of the surrounding shore, and you have almost elementsenough to make out a formula for all cases. In order to see how nearly I could guess, with this experience, atthe deepest point in a pond, by observing the outlines of a surfaceand the character of its shores alone, I made a plan of White Pond,which contains about forty-one acres, and, like this, has no island init, nor any visible inlet or outlet; and as the line of greatestbreadth fell very near the line of least breadth, where two oppositecapes approached each other and two opposite bays receded, Iventured to mark a point a short distance from the latter line, butstill on the line of greatest length, as the deepest. The deepest partwas found to be within one hundred feet of this, still farther inthe direction to which I had inclined, and was only one foot deeper,namely, sixty feet. Of course, a stream running through, or anisland in the pond, would make the problem much more complicated. If we knew all the laws of Nature, we should need only one fact,or the description of one actual phenomenon, to infer all theparticular results at that point. Now we know only a few laws, and ourresult is vitiated, not, of course, by any confusion or irregularityin Nature, but by our ignorance of essential elements in thecalculation. Our notions of law and harmony are commonly confined tothose instances which we detect; but the harmony which results froma far greater number of seemingly conflicting, but reallyconcurring, laws, which we have not detected, is still more wonderful.The particular laws are as our points of view, as, to the traveller, amountain outline varies with every step, and it has an infinite numberof profiles, though absolutely but one form. Even when cleft orbored through it is not comprehended in its entireness. What I have observed of the pond is no less true in ethics. It isthe law of average. Such a rule of the two diameters not only guidesus toward the sun in the system and the heart in man, but drawslines through the length and breadth of the aggregate of a man'sparticular daily behaviors and waves of life into his coves andinlets, and where they intersect will be the height or depth of hischaracter. Perhaps we need only to know how his shores trend and hisadjacent country or circumstances, to infer his depth and concealedbottom. If he is surrounded by mountainous circumstances, an Achilleanshore, whose peaks overshadow and are reflected in his bosom, theysuggest a corresponding depth in him. But a low and smooth shoreproves him shallow on that side. In our bodies, a bold projecting browfalls off to and indicates a corresponding depth of thought. Alsothere is a bar across the entrance of our every cove, or particularinclination; each is our harbor for a season, in which we are detainedand partially land-locked. These inclinations are not whimsicalusually, but their form, size, and direction are determined by thepromontories of the shore, the ancient axes of elevation. When thisbar is gradually increased by storms, tides, or currents, or thereis a subsidence of the waters, so that it reaches to the surface, thatwhich was at first but an inclination in the shore in which athought was harbored becomes an individual lake, cut off from theocean, wherein the thought secures its own conditions- changes,perhaps, from salt to fresh, becomes a sweet sea, dead sea, or amarsh. At the advent of each individual into this life, may we notsuppose that such a bar has risen to the surface somewhere? It istrue, we are such poor navigators that our thoughts, for the mostpart, stand off and on upon a harborless coast, are conversant onlywith the bights of the bays of poesy, or steer for the public ports ofentry, and go into the dry docks of science, where they merely refitfor this world, and no natural currents concur to individualize them. As for the inlet or outlet of Walden, I have not discovered anybut rain and snow and evaporation, though perhaps, with athermometer and a line, such places may be found, for where thewater flows into the pond it will probably be coldest in summer andwarmest in winter. When the ice-men were at work here in '46-7, thecakes sent to the shore were one day rejected by those who werestacking them up there, not being thick enough to lie side by sidewith the rest; and the cutters thus discovered that the ice over asmall space was two or three inches thinner than elsewhere, which madethem think that there was an inlet there. They also showed me inanother place what they thought was a "leach-hole," through whichthe pond leaked out under a hill into a neighboring meadow, pushing meout on a cake of ice to see it. It was a small cavity under ten feetof water; but I think that I can warrant the pond not to needsoldering till they find a worse leak than that. One has suggested,that if such a "leach-hole" should be found, its connection with themeadow, if any existed, might be proved by conveying some, coloredpowder or sawdust to the mouth of the hole, and then putting astrainer over the spring in the meadow, which would catch some ofthe particles carried through by the current. While I was surveying, the ice, which was sixteen inches thick,undulated under a slight wind like water. It is well known that alevel cannot be used on ice. At one rod from the shore its greatestfluctuation, when observed by means of a level on land directed towarda graduated staff on the ice, was three quarters of an inch, thoughthe ice appeared firmly attached to the shore. It was probably greaterin the middle. Who knows but if our instruments were delicate enoughwe might detect an undulation in the crust of the earth? When two legsof my level were on the shore and the third on the ice, and the sightswere directed over the latter, a rise or fall of the ice of analmost infinitesimal amount made a difference of several feet on atree across the pond. When I began to cut holes for sounding therewere three or four inches of water on the ice under a deep snowwhich had sunk it thus far; but the water began immediately to runinto these holes, and continued to run for two days in deep streams,which wore away the ice on every side, and contributed essentially, ifnot mainly, to dry the surface of the pond; for, as the water ranin, it raised and floated the ice. This was somewhat like cutting ahole in the bottom of a ship to let the water out. When such holesfreeze, and a rain succeeds, and finally a new freezing forms afresh smooth ice over all, it is beautifully mottled internally bydark figures, shaped somewhat like a spider's web, what you may callice rosettes, produced by the channels worn by the water flowingfrom all sides to a centre. Sometimes, also, when the ice wascovered with shallow puddles, I saw a double shadow of myself, onestanding on the head of the other, one on the ice, the other on thetrees or hillside. While yet it is cold January, and snow and ice are thick andsolid, the prudent landlord comes from the village to get ice tocool his summer drink; impressively, even pathetically, wise, toforesee the heat and thirst of July now in January- wearing a thickcoat and mittens! when so many things are not provided for. It maybe that he lays up no treasures in this world which will cool hissummer drink in the next. He cuts and saws the solid pond, unroofs thehouse of fishes, and carts off their very element and air, held fastby chains and stakes like corded wood, through the favoring winterair, to wintry cellars, to underlie the summer there. It looks likesolidified azure, as, far off, it is drawn through the streets.These ice-cutters are a merry race, full of jest and sport, and when Iwent among them they were wont to invite me to saw pit-fashion withthem, I standing underneath. In the winter of '46-7 there came a hundred men of Hyperboreanextraction swoop down on to our pond one morning, with many carloadsof ungainly-looking farming tools-sleds, plows, drill-barrows,turf-knives, spades, saws, rakes, and each man was armed with adouble-pointed pike-staff, such as is not described in the New-EnglandFarmer or the Cultivator. I did not know whether they had come tosow a crop of winter rye, or some other kind of grain recentlyintroduced from Iceland. As I saw no manure, I judged that theymeant to skim the land, as I had done, thinking the soil was deepand had lain fallow long enough. They said that a gentleman farmer,who was behind the scenes, wanted to double his money, which, as Iunderstood, amounted to half a million already; but in order tocover each one of his dollars with another, he took off the only coat,ay, the skin itself, of Walden Pond in the midst of a hard winter.They went to work at once, plowing, barrowing, rolling, furrowing,in admirable order, as if they were bent on making this a modelfarm; but when I was looking sharp to see what kind of seed theydropped into the furrow, a gang of fellows by my side suddenly beganto book up the virgin mould itself, with a peculiar jerk, clean downto the sand, or rather the water- for it was a very springy soil-indeed all the terra firma there was- and haul it away on sleds, andthen I guessed that they must be cutting peat in a bog. So they cameand went every day, with a peculiar shriek from the locomotive, fromand to some point of the polar regions, as it seemed to me, like aflock of arctic snow-birds. But sometimes Squaw Walden had herrevenge, and a hired man, walking behind his team, slipped through acrack in the ground down toward Tartarus, and he who was so bravebefore suddenly became but the ninth part of a man, almost gave up hisanimal heat, and was glad to take refuge in my house, and acknowledgedthat there was some virtue in a stove; or sometimes the frozen soiltook a piece of steel out of a plowshare, or a plow got set in thefurrow and had to be cut out. To speak literally, a hundred Irishmen, with Yankee overseers,came from Cambridge every day to get out the ice. They divided it intocakes by methods too well known to require description, and these,being sledded to the shore, were rapidly hauled off on to an iceplatform, and raised by grappling irons and block and tackle, workedby horses, on to a stack, as surely as so many barrels of flour, andthere placed evenly side by side, and row upon row, as if theyformed the solid base of an obelisk designed to pierce the clouds.They told me that in a good day they could get out a thousand tons,which was the yield of about one acre. Deep ruts and "cradle-holes"were worn in the ice, as on terra firma, by the passage of the sledsover the same track, and the horses invariably ate their oats out ofcakes of ice hollowed out like buckets. They stacked up the cakes thusin the open air in a pile thirty-five feet high on one side and six orseven rods square, putting hay between the outside layers to excludethe air; for when the wind, though never so cold, finds a passagethrough, it will wear large cavities, leaving slight supports or studsonly here and there, and finally topple it down. At first it lookedlike a vast blue fort or Valhalla; but when they began to tuck thecoarse meadow hay into the crevices, and this became covered with rimeand icicles, it looked like a venerable moss-grown and hoary ruin,built of azure-tinted marble, the abode of Winter, that old man we seein the almanac- his shanty, as if he had a design to estivate with us.They calculated that not twenty-five per cent of this would reachits destination, and that two or three per cent would be wasted in thecars. However, a still greater part of this heap had a differentdestiny from what was intended; for, either because the ice wasfound not to keep so well as was expected, containing more air thanusual, or for some other reason, it never got to market. This heap,made in the winter of '46-7 and estimated to contain ten thousandtons, was finally covered with hay and boards; and though it wasunroofed the following July, and a part of it carried off, the restremaining exposed to the sun, it stood over that summer and the nextwinter, and was not quite melted till September, 1848. Thus the pondrecovered the greater part. Like the water, the Walden ice, seen near at hand, has a green tint,but at a distance is beautifully blue, and you can easily tell it fromthe white ice of the river, or the merely greenish ice of someponds, a quarter of a mile off. Sometimes one of those great cakesslips from the ice-man's sled into the village street, and liesthere for a week like a great emerald, an object of interest to allpassers. I have noticed that a portion of Walden which in the state ofwater was green will often, when frozen, appear from the same point ofview blue. So the hollows about this pond will, sometimes, in thewinter, be filled with a greenish water somewhat like its own, but thenext day will have frozen blue. Perhaps the blue color of water andice is due to the light and air they contain, and the most transparentis the bluest. Ice is an interesting subject for contemplation. Theytold me that they had some in the ice-houses at Fresh Pond fiveyears old which was as good as ever. Why is it that a bucket ofwater soon becomes putrid, but frozen remains sweet forever? It iscommonly said that this is the difference between the affections andthe intellect. Thus for sixteen days I saw from my window a hundred men at worklike busy husbandmen, with teams and horses and apparently all theimplements of farming, such a picture as we see on the first page ofthe almanac; and as often as I looked out I was reminded of thefable of the lark and the reapers, or the parable of the sower, andthe like; and now they are all gone, and in thirty days more,probably, I shall look from the same window on the pure sea-greenWalden water there, reflecting the clouds and the trees, and sendingup its evaporations in solitude, and no traces will appear that aman has ever stood there. Perhaps I shall hear a solitary loon laughas he dives and plumes himself, or shall see a lonely fisher in hisboat, like a floating leaf, beholding his form reflected in the waves,where lately a hundred men securely labored. Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston andNew Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well. Inthe morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonalphilosophy of the Bhagvat-Geeta, since whose composition years ofthe gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern worldand its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if thatphilosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence,so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the bookand go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of theBramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in histemple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of atree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to drawwater for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in thesame well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water ofthe Ganges. With favoring winds it is wafted past the site of thefabulous islands of Atlantis and the Hesperides, makes the periplus ofHanno, and, floating by Ternate and Tidore and the mouth of thePersian Gulf, melts in the tropic gales of the Indian seas, and islanded in ports of which Alexander only heard the names. SPRING. THE OPENING of large tracts by the ice-cutters commonly causes a pond to break up earlier; for the water, agitated by the wind, even in cold weather, wears away the surrounding ice. But such was not the effect on Walden that year, for she had soon got a thick new garment to take the place of the old. This pond never breaks up so soon as the others in this neighborhood, on account both of its greater depth and its having no stream passing through it to melt or wear away the ice. I never knew it to open in the course of a winter, not excepting that Of '52-3, which gave the ponds so severe a trial. It commonly opens about the first of April, a week or ten days later than Flint's Pond and Fair Haven, beginning to melt on the north side and in the shallower parts where it began to freeze. It indicates better than any water hereabouts the absolute progress of the season, being least affected by transient changes of temperature. A severe cold of it few days duration in March may very much retard the opening of the former ponds, while the temperature of Walden increases almost uninterruptedly. A thermometer thrust into the middle of Walden on the 6th of March, 1847, stood at 32', or freezing point; near the shore at 33'; in the middle of Flint's Pond, the same day, at 32 1/2'; at a dozen rods from the shore, in shallow water, under ice a foot thick, at 36'. This difference of three and it half degrees between the temperature of the deep water and the shallow in the latter pond, and the fact that a great proportion of it is comparatively shallow, show why it should break up so much sooner than Walden. The ice in the shallowest part was at this time several inches thinner than in the middle. In midwinter the middle had been the warmest and the ice thinnest there. So, also, every one who has waded about the shores of the pond in summer must have perceived how much warmer the water is close to the shore, where only three or four inches deep, than a little distance out, and on the surface where it is deep, than near the bottom. In spring the sun not only exerts an influence through the increased temperature of the air and earth, but its heat passes through ice a foot or more thick, and is reflected from the bottom in shallow water, and so also warms the water and melts the under side of the ice, at the same time that it is melting it more directly above, making it uneven, and causing the air bubbles which it contains to extend themselves upward and downward until it is completely honeycombed, and at last disappears suddenly in a single spring rain. Ice has its grain as well as wood, and when a cake begins to rot or "comb," that is, assume the appearance of honeycomb, whatever may be its position, the air cells are at right angles with what was the water surface. Where there is a rock or a log rising near to the surface the ice over it is much thinner, and is frequently quite dissolved by this reflected heat; and I have been told that in the experiment at Cambridge to freeze water in a shallow wooden pond, though the cold air circulated underneath, and so had access to both sides, the reflection of the sun from the bottom more than counterbalanced this advantage. When a warm rain in the middle of the winter melts off the snow ice from Walden, and leaves a hard dark or transparent ice on the middle, there will be a strip of rotten though thicker white ice, a rod or more wide, about the shores, created by this reflected heat. Also, as I have said, the bubbles themselves within the ice operate as burning-glasses to melt the ice beneath. The phenomena of the year take place every day in a pond on a small scale. Every morning, generally speaking, the shallow water is being warmed more rapidly than the deep, though it may not be made so warm after all, and every evening it is being cooled more rapidly until the morning, The day is an epitome of the year. The night is the winter, the morning and evening are the spring and fall, and the noon is the summer. The cracking and booming of the ice indicate a change of temperature. One pleasant morning after a cold night, February 24th, 1850, having gone to Flint's Pond to spend the day, I noticed with surprise, that when I struck the ice with the head of my axe, it resounded like a gong for many rods around, or as if I had struck on a tight drum-head. The pond began to boom about an hour after sunrise, when it felt the influence of the sun's rays slanted upon it from over the hills; it stretched itself and yawned like a waking man with a gradually increasing tumult, which was kept up three or four hours. It took a short siesta at noon, and boomed once more toward night, as the sun was withdrawing his influence. In the right stage of the weather a pond fires its evening gun with great regularity. But in the middle of the day, being full of cracks, and the air also being less elastic, it had completely lost its resonance, and probably fishes and muskrats could not then have been stunned by a blow on it. The fishermen say that the "thundering of the pond" scares the fishes and prevents their biting. The pond does not thunder every evening, and I cannot tell surely when to expect its thundering; but though I may perceive no difference in the weather, it does. Who would have suspected so large and cold and thick-skinned a thing to be so sensitive? Yet it has its law to which it thunders obedience when it should as surely as the buds expand in the spring. The earth is all alive and covered with papillae. The largest pond is as sensitive to atmospheric changes as the globule of mercury in its tube. One attraction in coming to the woods to live was that I should have leisure and opportunity to see the Spring come in. The ice in the pond at length begins to be honeycombed, and I can set my heel in it as I walk. Fogs and rains and warmer suns are gradually melting the snow; the days have grown sensibly longer; and I see how I shall get through the winter without adding to my woodpile, for large fires are no longer necessary. I am on the alert for the first signs of spring, to hear the chance note of some arriving bird, or the striped squirrel's chirp, for his stores must be now nearly exhausted, or see the woodchuck venture out of his winter quarters. On the 13th of March, after I had heard the bluebird, song sparrow, and red-wing, the ice was still nearly a foot thick. As the weather grew warmer it was not sensibly worn away by the water, nor broken up and floated off as in rivers, but, though it was completely melted for half a rod in width about the shore, the middle was merely honeycombed and saturated with water, so that you could put your foot through it when six inches thick; but by the next day evening, perhaps, after a warm rain followed by fog, it would have wholly disappeared, all gone off with the fog, spirited away. One year I went across the middle only five days before it disappeared entirely. In 1845 Walden was first completely open on the 1st of April; in '46, the 25th of March; in '47, the 8th of April; in '51, the 28th of March; in '52, the 18th of April; in '53, the 23d of March; in '54, about the 7th of April. Every incident connected with the breaking up of the rivers and ponds and the settling of the weather is particularly interesting to us who live in a climate of so great extremes. When the warmer days come, they who dwell near the river hear the ice crack at night with a startling whoop as loud as artillery, as if its icy fetters were rent from end to end, and within a few days see it rapidly going out. So the alligator comes out of the mud with quakings of the earth. One old man, who has been a close observer of Nature, and seems as thoroughly wise in regard to all her operations as if she had been put upon the stocks when he was a boy, and he had helped to lay her keel- who has come to his growth, and can hardly acquire more of natural lore if he should live to the age of Methuselah- told me- and I was surprised to hear him express wonder at any of Nature's operations, for I thought that there were no secrets between them- that one spring day he took his gun and boat, and thought that he would have a little sport with the ducks. There was ice still on the meadows, but it was all gone out of the river, and he dropped down without obstruction from Sudbury, where he lived, to Fair Haven Pond, which he found, unexpectedly, covered for the most part with a firm field of ice. It was a warm day, and he was surprised to see so great a body of ice remaining. Not seeing any ducks, he hid his boat on the north or back side of an island in the pond, and then concealed himself in the bushes on the south side, to await them. The ice was melted for three or four rods from the shore, and there was a smooth and warm sheet of water, with a muddy bottom, such as the ducks love, within, and he thought it likely that some would be along pretty soon. After he had lain still there about an hour he heard a low and seemingly very distant sound, but singularly grand and impressive, unlike anything he had ever heard, gradually swelling and increasing as if it would have a universal and memorable ending, a sullen rush and roar, which seemed to him all at once like the sound of a vast body of fowl coming in to settle there, and, seizing his gun, he started up in haste and excited; but he found, to his surprise, that the whole body of the ice had started while he lay there, and drifted in to the shore, and the sound he had heard was made by its edge grating on the shore- at first gently nibbled and crumbled off, but at length heaving up and scattering its wrecks along the island to a considerable height before it came to a standstill. At length the sun's rays have attained the right angle, and warm winds blow up mist and rain and melt the snowbanks, and the sun, dispersing the mist, smiles on a checkered landscape of russet and white smoking with incense, through which the traveller picks his way from islet to islet, cheered by the music of a thousand tinkling rills and rivulets whose veins are filled with the blood of winter which they are bearing off. Few phenomena gave me more delight than to observe the forms which thawing sand and clay assume in flowing down the sides of a deep cut on the railroad through which I passed on my way to the village, a phenomenon not very common on so large a scale, though the number of freshly exposed banks of the right material must have been greatly multiplied since railroads were invented. The material was sand of every degree of fineness and of various rich colors, commonly mixed with a little clay. When the frost comes out in the spring, and even in a thawing day in the winter, the sand begins to flow down the slopes like lava, sometimes bursting out through the snow and overflowing it where no sand was to be seen before. Innumerable little streams overlap and interlace one with another, exhibiting a sort of hybrid product, which obeys half way the law of currents, and half way that of vegetation. As it flows it takes the forms of sappy leaves or vines, making heaps of pulpy sprays a foot or more in depth, and resembling, as you look down on them, the laciniated, lobed, and imbricated thalluses of some lichens; or you are reminded of coral, of leopard's paws or birds' feet, of brains or lungs or bowels, and excrements of all kinds. It is a truly grotesque vegetation, whose forms and color we see imitated in bronze, a sort of architectural foliage more ancient and typical than acanthus, chiccory, ivy, vine, or any vegetable leaves; destined perhaps, under some circumstances, to become a puzzle to future geologists. The whole cut impressed me as if it were a cave with its stalactites laid open to the light. The various shades of the sand are singularly rich and agreeable, embracing the different iron colors, brown, gray, yellowish, and reddish. When the flowing mass reaches the drain at the foot of the bank it spreads out flatter into strands, the separate streams losing their semicylindrical form and gradually becoming more flat and broad, running together as they are more moist, till they form an almost flat sand, still variously and beautifully shaded, but in which you call trace the original forms of vegetation; till at length, in the water itself, they are converted into banks, like those formed off the mouths of rivers, and the forms of vegetation are lost in the ripple- marks on the bottom. The whole bank, which is from twenty to forty feet high, is sometimes overlaid with a mass of this kind of foliage, or sandy rupture, for a quarter of a mile on one or both sides, the produce of one spring day. What makes this sand foliage remarkable is its springing into existence thus suddenly. When I see on the one side the inert bank- for the sun acts on one side first- and on the other this luxuriant foliage, the creation of an hour, I am affected as if in a peculiar sense I stood in the laboratory of the Artist who made the world and me- had come to where he was still at work, sporting on this bank, and with excess of energy strewing his fresh designs about. I feel as if I were nearer to the vitals of the globe, for this sandy overflow is something such a foliaceous mass as the vitals of the animal body. You find thus in the very sands an anticipation of the vegetable leaf. No wonder that the earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves, it so labors with the idea inwardly. The atoms have already learned this law, and are pregnant by it. The overhanging leaf sees here its prototype. Internally, whether in the globe or animal body, it is a moist thick lobe, a word especially applicable to the liver and lungs and the leaves of fat (leibo, labor, lapsus, to flow or slip downward, a lapsing; lobos, globus, lobe, globe; also lap, flap, and many other words); externally a dry thin leaf, even as the f and v are a pressed and dried b. The radicals of lobe are lb, the soft mass of the b (single-lobed, or B, double-lobed), with the liquid l behind it pressing it forward. In globe, glb, the guttural g adds to the meaning the capacity of the throat. The feathers and wings of birds are still drier and thinner leaves. Thus, also, you pass from the lumpish grub in the earth to the airy and fluttering butterfly. The very globe continually transcends and translates itself, and becomes winged in its orbit. Even ice begins with delicate crystal leaves, as if it had flowed into moulds which the fronds of waterplants have impressed on the watery mirror. The whole tree itself is but one leaf, and rivers are still vaster leaves whose pulp is intervening earth, and towns and cities are the ova of insects in their axils. When the sun withdraws the sand ceases to flow, but in the morning the streams will start once more and branch and branch again into a myriad of others. You here see perchance how blood-vessels are formed. If you look closely you observe that first there pushes forward from the thawing mass a stream of softened sand with a drop-like point, like the ball of the finger, feeling its way slowly and blindly downward, until at last with more heat and moisture, as the sun gets higher, the most fluid portion, in its effort to obey the law to which the most inert also yields, separates from the latter and forms for itself a meandering channel or artery within that, in which is seen a little silvery stream glancing like lightning from one stage of pulpy leaves or branches to another, and ever and anon swallowed up in the sand. It is wonderful how rapidly yet perfectly the sand organizes itself as it flows, using the best material its mass affords to form the sharp edges of its channel. Such are the sources of rivers. In the silicious matter which the water deposits is perhaps the bony system, and in the still finer soil and organic matter the fleshy fibre or cellular tissue. What is man but a mass of thawing clay? The ball of the human finger is but a drop congealed. The fingers and toes flow to their extent from the thawing mass of the body. Who knows what the human body would expand and flow out to under a more genial heaven? Is not the hand a spreading palm leaf with its lobes and veins? The ear may be regarded, fancifully, as a lichen, Umbilicaria, on the side of the head, with its lobe or drop. The lip-labium, from labor (?)- laps or lapses from the sides of the cavernous mouth. The nose is a manifest congealed drop or stalactite. The chin is a still larger drop, the confluent dripping of the face. The cheeks are a slide from the brows into the valley of the face, opposed and diffused by the cheek bones. Each rounded lobe of the vegetable leaf, too, is a thick and now loitering drop, larger or smaller; the lobes are the fingers of the leaf; and as many lobes as it has, in so many directions it tends to flow, and more heat or other genial influences would have caused it to flow yet farther. Thus it seemed that this one hillside illustrated the principle of all the operations of Nature. The Maker of this earth but patented a leaf. What Champollion will decipher this hieroglyphic for us, that we may turn over a new leaf at last? This phenomenon is more exhilarating to me than the luxuriance and fertility of vineyards. True, it is somewhat excrementitious in its character, and there is no end to the heaps of liver, lights, and bowels, as if the globe were turned wrong side outward; but this suggests at least that Nature has some bowels, and there again is mother of humanity. This is the frost coming out of the ground; this is Spring. It precedes the green and flowery spring, as mythology precedes regular poetry. I know of nothing more purgative of winter fumes and indigestions. It convinces me that Earth is still in her swaddling-clothes, and stretches forth baby fingers on every side. Fresh curls spring from the baldest brow. There is nothing inorganic. These foliaceous heaps lie along the bank like the slag of a furnace, showing that Nature is "in full blast" within. The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit- not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. Its throes will heave our exuviae from their graves. You may melt your metals and cast them into the most beautiful moulds you can; they will never excite me like the forms which this molten earth flows out into. And not only it, but the institutions upon it are plastic like clay in the hands of the potter. Ere long, not only on these banks, but on every hill and plain and in every hollow, the frost comes out of the ground like a dormant quadruped from its burrow, and seeks the sea with music, or migrates to other climes in clouds. Thaw with his gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other but breaks in pieces. When the ground was partially bare of snow, and a few warm days had dried its surface somewhat, it was pleasant to compare the first tender signs of the infant year just peeping forth with the stately beauty of the withered vegetation which had withstood the winter-life- everlasting, goldenrods, pinweeds, and graceful wild grasses, more obvious and interesting frequently than in summer even, as if their beauty was not ripe till then; even cotton-grass, cat-tails, mulleins, johnswort, hardhack, meadowsweet, and other strong-stemmed plants, those unexhausted granaries which entertain the earliest birds- decent weeds, at least, which widowed Nature wears. I am particularly attracted by the arching and sheaf- like top of the wool-grass; it brings back the summer to our winter memories, and is among the forms which art loves to copy, and which, in the vegetable kingdom, have the same relation to types already in the mind of man that astronomy has. It is an antique style, older than Greek or Egyptian. Many of the phenomena of Winter are suggestive of an inexpressible tenderness and fragile delicacy. We are accustomed to hear this king described as a rude and boisterous tyrant; but with the gentleness of a lover he adorns the tresses of Summer. At the approach of spring the red squirrels got under my house, two at a time, directly under my feet as I sat reading or writing, and kept up the queerest chuckling and chirruping and vocal pirouetting and gurgling sounds that ever were heard; and when I stamped they only chirruped the louder, as if past all fear and respect in their mad pranks, defying humanity to stop them. No, you don't- chickaree- chickaree. They were wholly deaf to my arguments, or failed to perceive their force, and fell into a strain of invective that was irresistible. The first sparrow of spring! The year beginning with younger hope than ever! The faint silvery warblings heard over the partially bare and moist fields from the bluebird, the song sparrow, and the red-wing, as if the last flakes of winter tinkled as they fell! What at such a time are histories, chronologies, traditions, and all written revelations? The brooks sing carols and glees to the spring. The marsh hawk, sailing low over the meadow, is already seeking the first slimy life that awakes. The sinking sound of melting snow is heard in all dells, and the ice dissolves apace in the ponds. The grass flames up on the hillsides like a spring fire- "et primitus oritur herba imbribus primoribus evocata"- as if the earth sent forth an inward heat to greet the returning sun; not yellow but green is the color of its flame;- the symbol of perpetual youth, the grass-blade, like a long green ribbon, streams from the sod into the summer, checked indeed by the frost, but anon pushing on again, lifting its spear of last year's hay with the fresh life below. It grows as steadily as the rill oozes out of the ground. It is almost identical with that, for in the growing days of June, when the rills are dry, the grass-blades are their channels, and from year to year the herds drink at this perennial green stream, and the mower draws from it betimes their winter supply. So our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity. Walden is melting apace. There is a canal two rods wide along the northerly and westerly sides, and wider still at the east end. A great field of ice has cracked off from the main body. I hear a song sparrow singing from the bushes on the shore- olit, olit, olit- chip, chip, chip, che char- che wiss, wiss, wiss. He too is helping to crack it. How handsome the great sweeping curves in the edge of the ice, answering somewhat to those of the shore, but more regular! It is unusually hard, owing to the recent severe but transient cold, and all watered or waved like a palace floor. But the wind slides eastward over its opaque surface in vain, till it reaches the living surface beyond. It is glorious to behold this ribbon of water sparkling in the sun, the bare face of the pond full of glee and youth, as if it spoke the joy of the fishes within it, and of the sands on its shore- a silvery sheen as from the scales of a leuciscus, as it were all one active fish. Such is the contrast between winter and spring. Walden was dead and is alive again. But this spring it broke up more steadily, as I have said. The change from storm and winter to serene and mild weather, from dark and sluggish hours to bright and elastic ones, is a memorable crisis which all things proclaim. It is seemingly instantaneous at last. Suddenly an influx of light filled my house, though the evening was at hand, and the clouds of winter still overhung it, and the eaves were dripping with sleety rain. I looked out the window, and lo! where yesterday was cold gray ice there lay the transparent pond already calm and full of hope as in a summer evening, reflecting a summer evening sky in its bosom, though none was visible overhead, as if it had intelligence with some remote horizon. I heard a robin in the distance, the first I had heard for many a thousand years, methought, whose note I shall not forget for many a thousand more- the same sweet and powerful song as of yore. O the evening robin, at the end of a New England summer day! If I could ever find the twig he sits upon! I mean he; I mean the twig. This at least is not the Turdus migratorius. The pitch pines and shrub oaks about my house, which had so long drooped, suddenly resumed their several characters, looked brighter, greener, and more erect and alive, as if effectually cleansed and restored by the rain. I knew that it would not rain any more. You may tell by looking at any twig of the forest, ay, at your very wood-pile, whether its winter is past or not. As it grew darker, I was startled by the honking of geese flying low over the woods, like weary travellers getting in late from Southern lakes, and indulging at last in unrestrained complaint and mutual consolation. Standing at my door, I could bear the rush of their wings; when, driving toward my house, they suddenly spied my light, and with hushed clamor wheeled and settled in the pond. So I came in, and shut the door, and passed my first spring night in the woods. In the morning I watched the geese from the door through the mist, sailing in the middle of the pond, fifty rods off, so large and tumultuous that Walden appeared like an artificial pond for their amusement. But when I stood on the shore they at once rose up with a great flapping of wings at the signal of their commander, and when they had got into rank circled about over my head, twenty-nine of them, and then steered straight to Canada, with a regular honk from the leader at intervals, trusting to break their fast in muddier pools. A "plump" of ducks rose at the same time and took the route to the north in the wake of their noisier cousins. For a week I heard the circling, groping clangor of some solitary goose in the foggy mornings, seeking its companion, and still peopling the woods with the sound of a larger life than they could sustain. In April the pigeons were seen again flying express in small flocks, and in due time I heard the martins twittering over my clearing, though it had not seemed that the township contained so many that it could afford me any, and I fancied that they were peculiarly of the ancient race that dwelt in hollow trees ere white men came. In almost all climes the tortoise and the frog are among the precursors and heralds of this season, and birds fly with song and glancing plumage, and plants spring and bloom, and winds blow, to correct this slight oscillation of the poles and preserve the equilibrium of nature. As every season seems best to us in its turn, so the coming in of spring is like the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos and the realization of the Golden Age. "Eurus ad Auroram Nabathaeaque regna recessit, Persidaque, et radiis juga subdita matutinis." "The East-Wind withdrew to Aurora and the Nabathean kingdom, And the Persian, and the ridges placed under the morning rays. Man was born. Whether that Artificer of things, The origin of a better world, made him from the divine seed; Or the earth, being recent and lately sundered from the high Ether, retained some seeds of cognate heaven." A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. So our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts. We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call doing our duty. We loiter in winter while it is already spring. In a pleasant spring morning all men's sins are forgiven. Such a day is a truce to vice. While such a sun holds out to burn, the vilest sinner may return. Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors. You may have known your neighbor yesterday for a thief, a drunkard, or a sensualist, and merely pitied or despised him, and despaired of the world; but the sun shines bright and warm this first spring morning, re-creating the world, and you meet him at some serene work, and see how it is exhausted and debauched veins expand with still joy and bless the new day, feel the spring influence with the innocence of infancy, and all his faults are forgotten. There is not only an atmosphere of good will about him, but even a savor of holiness groping for expression, blindly and ineffectually perhaps, like a new-born instinct, and for a short hour the south hillside echoes to no vulgar jest. You see some innocent fair shoots preparing to burst from his gnarled rind and try another year's life, tender and fresh as the youngest plant. Even he has entered into the joy of his Lord. Why the jailer does not leave open his prison doors- why the judge does not dismis his case- why the preacher does not dismiss his congregation! It is because they do not obey the hint which God gives them, nor accept the pardon which he freely offers to all. "A return to goodness produced each day in the tranquil and beneficent breath of the morning, causes that in respect to the love of virtue and the hatred of vice, one approaches a little the primitive nature of man, as the sprouts of the forest which has been felled. In like manner the evil which one does in the interval of a day prevents the germs of virtues which began to spring up again from developing themselves and destroys them. "After the germs of virtue have thus been prevented many times from developing themselves, then the beneficent breath of evening does not suffice to preserve them. As soon as the breath of evening does not suffice longer to preserve them, then the nature of man does not differ much from that of the brute. Men seeing the nature of this man like that of the brute, think that he has never possessed the innate faculty of reason. Are those the true and natural sentiments of man?" "The Golden Age was first created, which without any avenger Spontaneously without law cherished fidelity and rectitude. Punishment and fear were not; nor were threatening words read On suspended brass; nor did the suppliant crowd fear The words of their judge; but were safe without an avenger. Not yet the pine felled on its mountains had descended To the liquid waves that it might see a foreign world, And mortals knew no shores but their own. There was eternal spring, and placid zephyrs with warm Blasts soothed the flowers born without seed." On the 29th of April, as I was fishing from the bank of the river near the Nine-Acre-Corner bridge, standing on the quaking grass and willow roots, where the muskrats lurk, I heard a singular rattling sound, somewhat like that of the sticks which boys play with their fingers, when, looking up, I observed a very slight and graceful hawk, like a nighthawk, alternately soaring like a ripple and tumbling a rod or two over and over, showing the under side of its wings, which gleamed like a satin ribbon in the sun, or like the pearly inside of a shell. This sight reminded me of falconry and what nobleness and poetry are associated with that sport. The merlin it seemed to me it might be called: but I care not for its name. It was the most ethereal flight I had ever witnessed. It did not simply flutter like a butterfly, nor soar like the larger hawks, but it sported with proud reliance in the fields of air; mounting again and again with its strange chuckle, it repeated its free and beautiful fall, turning over and over like a kite, and then recovering from its lofty tumbling, as if it had never set its foot on terra firma. It appeared to have no companion in the universe-sporting there alone- and to need none but the morning and the ether with which it played. It was not lonely, but made all the earth lonely beneath it. Where was the parent which hatched it, its kindred, and its father in the heavens? The tenant of the air, it seemed related to the earth but by an egg hatched some time in the crevice of a crag;- or was its native nest made in the angle of a cloud, woven of the rainbow's trimmings and the sunset sky, and lined with some soft midsummer haze caught up from earth? Its eyry now some cliffy cloud. Beside this I got a rare mess of golden and silver and bright cupreous fishes, which looked like a string of jewels. Ah! I have penetrated to those meadows on the morning of many a first spring day, jumping from hummock to hummock, from willow root to willow root, when the wild river valley and the woods were bathed in so pure and bright a light as would have waked the dead, if they had been slumbering in their graves, as some suppose. There needs no stronger proof of immortality. All things must live in such a light. O Death, where was thy sting? O Grave, where was thy victory, then? Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness- to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander. We are cheered when we observe the vulture feeding on the carrion which disgusts and disheartens us, and deriving health and strength from the repast. There was a dead horse in the hollow by the path to my house, which compelled me sometimes to go out of my way, especially in the night when the air was heavy, but the assurance it gave me of the strong appetite and inviolable health of Nature was my compensation for this. I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on one another; that tender organizations can be so serenely squashed out of existence like pulp-tadpoles which herons gobble up, and tortoises and toads run over in the road; and that sometimes it has rained flesh and blood! With the liability to accident, we must see how little account is to be made of it. The impression made on a wise man is that of universal innocence. Poison is not poisonous after all, nor are any wounds fatal. Compassion is a very untenable ground. It must be expeditious. Its pleadings will not bear to be stereotyped. Early in May, the oaks, hickories, maples, and other trees, just putting out amidst the pine woods around the pond, imparted a brightness like sunshine to the landscape, especially in cloudy days, as if the sun were breaking through mists and shining faintly on the hillsides here and there. On the third or fourth of May I saw a loon in the pond, and during the first week of the month I heard the whip-poor-will, the brown thrasher, the veery, the wood pewee, the chewink, and other birds. I had heard the wood thrush long before. The phoebe had already come once more and looked in at my door and window, to see if my house was cavern-like enough for her, sustaining herself on humming winds with clinched talons, as if she held by the air, while she surveyed the premises. The sulphur-like pollen of the pitch pine soon covered the pond and the stones and rotten wood along the shore, so that you could have collected a barrelful. This is the "sulphur showers" we bear of. Even in Calidas' drama of Sacontala, we read of "rills dyed yellow with the golden dust of the lotus." And so the seasons went rolling on into summer, as one rambles into higher and higher grass. Thus was my first year's life in the woods completed; and the second year was similar to it. I finally left Walden September 6th, 1847. CONCLUSION. TO THE sick the doctors wisely recommend a change of air andscenery. Thank Heaven, here is not all the world. The buckeye does notgrow in New England, and the mockingbird is rarely heard here. Thewild goose is more of a cosmopolite than we; he breaks his fast inCanada, takes a luncheon in the Ohio, and plumes himself for the nightin a southern bayou. Even the bison, to some extent, keeps pace withthe seasons cropping the pastures of the Colorado only till agreener and sweeter grass awaits him by the Yellowstone. Yet wethink that if rail fences are pulled down, and stone walls piled up onour farms, bounds are henceforth set to our lives and our fatesdecided. If you are chosen town clerk, forsooth, you cannot go toTierra del Fuego this summer: but you may go to the land of infernalfire nevertheless. The universe is wider than our views of it. Yet we should oftener look over the tafferel of our craft, likecurious passengers, and not make the voyage like stupid sailorspicking oakum. The other side of the globe is but the home of ourcorrespondent. Our voyaging is only great-circle sailing, and thedoctors prescribe for diseases of the skin merely. One hastens tosouthern Africa to chase the giraffe; but surely that is not thegame he would be after. How long, pray, would a man hunt giraffes ifhe could? Snipes and woodcocks also may afford rare sport; but I trustit would be nobler game to shoot one's self. "Direct your eye right inward, and you'll find A thousand regions in your mind Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be Expert in home-cosmography." What does Africa- what does the West stand for? Is not our owninterior white on the chart? black though it may prove, like thecoast, when discovered. Is it the source of the Nile, or the Niger, orthe Mississippi, or a Northwest Passage around this continent, that wewould find? Are these the problems which most concern mankind? IsFranklin the only man who is lost, that his wife should be soearnest to find him? Does Mr. Grinnell know where he himself is? Berather the Mungo Park, the Lewis and Clark and Frobisher, of yourown streams and oceans; explore your own higher latitudes- withshiploads of preserved meats to support you, if they be necessary; andpile the empty cans sky-high for a sign. Were preserved meats inventedto preserve meat merely? Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continentsand worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but ofthought. Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthlyempire of the Czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the ice.Yet some can be patriotic who have no self-respect, and sacrificethe greater to the less. They love the soil which makes theirgraves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animatetheir clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads. What was themeaning of that South-Sea Exploring Expedition, with all its paradeand expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact that there arecontinents and seas in the moral world to which every man is anisthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, but that it is easier tosail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in agovernment ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than itis to explore the private seal the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one'sbeing alone. "Erret, et extremos alter scrutetur Iberos. Plus habet hic vitae, plus habet ille viae." Let them wander and scrutinize the outlandish Australians. I have more of God, they more of the road. It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats inZanzibar. Yet do this even till you can do better, and you may perhapsfind some "Symmes' Hole" by which to get at the inside at last.England and France, Spain and Portugal, Gold Coast and Slave Coast,all front on this private sea; but no bark from them has venturedout of sight of land, though it is without doubt the direct way toIndia. If you would learn to speak all tongues and conform to thecustoms of all nations, if you would travel farther than alltravellers, be naturalized in all climes, and cause the Sphinx to dashher bead against a stone, even obey the precept of the oldphilosopher, and Explore thyself. Herein are demanded the eye andthe nerve. Only the defeated and deserters go to the wars, cowardsthat run away and enlist. Start now on that farthest western way,which does not pause at the Mississippi or the Pacific, nor conducttoward a wornout China or Japan, but leads on direct, a tangent tothis sphere, summer and winter, day and night, sun down, moon down,and at last earth down too. It is said that Mirabeau took to highway robbery "to ascertainwhat degree of resolution was necessary in order to place one's selfin formal opposition to the most sacred laws of society." Hedeclared that "a soldier who fights in the ranks does not require halfso much courage as a foot-pad"- "that honor and religion have neverstood in the way of a well-considered and a firm resolve." This wasmanly, as the world goes; and yet it was idle, if not desperate. Asaner man would have found himself often enough "in formal opposition"to what are deemed "the most sacred laws of society," throughobedience to yet more sacred laws, and so have tested his resolutionwithout going out of his way. It is not for a man to put himself insuch an attitude to society, but to maintain himself in whateverattitude he find himself through obedience to the laws of his being,which will never be one of opposition to a just government, if heshould chance to meet with such. I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps itseemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could notspare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily andinsensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten trackfor ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a pathfrom my door to the pond-side; and though it is Eve or six years sinceI trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear, that othersmay have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface ofthe earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so withthe paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must bethe Highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition andconformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to gobefore the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could bestsee the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now. I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advancesconfidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to livethe life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpectedin common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass aninvisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will beginto establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws beexpanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and hewill live with the license of a higher order of beings. Inproportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe willappear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor povertypoverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in theair, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now putthe foundations under them. It is a ridiculous demand which England and America make, that youshall speak so that they can understand you. Neither men nortoadstools grow so. As if that were important, and there were notenough to understand you without them. As if Nature could supportbut one order of understandings, could not sustain birds as well asquadrupeds, flying as well as creeping things, and hush and whoa,which Bright can understand, were the best English. As if there weresafety in stupidity alone. I fear chiefly lest my expression may notbe extra-vagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrowlimits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth ofwhich I have been convinced. Extra vagance! it depends on how youare yarded. The migrating buffalo, which seeks new pastures in anotherlatitude, is not extravagant like the cow which kicks over the pail,leaps the cowyard fence, and runs after her calf, in milking time. Idesire to speak somewhere without bounds; like a man in a wakingmoment, to men in their waking moments; for I am convinced that Icannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a trueexpression. Who that has heard a strain of music feared then lest heshould speak extravagantly any more forever? In view of the futureor possible, we should live quite laxly and undefined in front ouroutlines dim and misty on that side; as our shadows reveal aninsensible perspiration toward the sun. The volatile truth of ourwords should continually betray the inadequacy of the residualstatement. Their truth is instantly translated; its literal monumentalone remains. The words which express our faith and piety are notdefinite; yet they are significant and fragrant like frankincense tosuperior natures. Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise thatas common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, whichthey express by snoring. Sometimes we are inclined to class thosewho are once-and-a-half-witted with the half-witted, because weappreciate only a third part of their wit. Some would find faultwith the morning red, if they ever got up early enough. "Theypretend," as I hear, "that the verses of Kabir have four differentsenses; illusion, spirit, intellect, and the exoteric doctrine ofthe Vedas"; but in this part of the world it is considered a groundfor complaint if a man's writings admit of more than oneinterpretation. While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot, willnot any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much morewidely and fatally? I do not suppose that I have attained to obscurity, but I shouldbe proud if no more fatal fault were found with my pages on this scorethan was found with the Walden ice. Southern customers objected to itsblue color, which is the evidence of its purity, as if it weremuddy, and preferred the Cambridge ice, which is white, but tastesof weeds. The purity men love is like the mists which envelop theearth, and not like the azure ether beyond. Some are dinning in our ears that we Americans, and modernsgenerally, are intellectual dwarfs compared with the ancients, or eventhe Elizabethan men. But what is that to the purpose? A living dogis better than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because hebelongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that hecan? Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what hewas made. Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in suchdesperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with hiscompanions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Lethim step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. Itis not important that he should mature as soon as an apple tree oran oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer? If the condition ofthings which we were made for is not yet, what were any realitywhich we can substitute? We will not be shipwrecked on a vain reality.Shall we with pains erect a heaven of blue glass over ourselves,though when it is done we shall be sure to gaze still at the trueethereal heaven far above, as if the former were not? There was an artist in the city of Kouroo who was disposed to striveafter perfection. One day it came into his mind to make a staff.Having considered that in an imperfect work time is an ingredient, butinto a perfect work time does not enter, he said to himself, Itshall be perfect in all respects, though I should do nothing else inmy life. He proceeded instantly to the forest for wood, being resolvedthat it should not be made of unsuitable material; and as hesearched for and rejected stick after stick, his friends graduallydeserted him, for they grew old in their works and died, but he grewnot older by a moment. His singleness of purpose and resolution, andhis elevated piety, endowed him, without his knowledge, with perennialyouth. As he made no compromise with Time, Time kept out of his way,and only sighed at a distance because he could not overcome him.Before he had found a stock in all respects suitable the city ofKouroo was a hoary ruin, and he sat on one of its mounds to peel thestick. Before he had given it the proper shape the dynasty of theCandahars was at an end, and with the point of the stick he wrotethe name of the last of that race in the sand, and then resumed hiswork. By the time he had smoothed and polished the staff Kalpa wasno longer the pole-star; and ere he had put on the ferule and the headadorned with precious stones, Brahma had awoke and slumbered manytimes. But why do I stay to mention these things? When the finishingstroke was put to his work, it suddenly expanded before the eyes ofthe astonished artist into the fairest of all the creations of Brahma.He had made a new system in making a staff, a world with fun andfair proportions; in which, though the old cities and dynasties hadpassed away, fairer and more glorious ones had taken their places. Andnow he saw by the heap of shavings still fresh at his feet, that,for him and his work, the former lapse of time had been an illusion,and that no more time had elapsed than is required for a singlescintillation from the brain of Brahma to fall on and inflame thetinder of a mortal brain. The material was pure, and his art was pure;how could the result be other than wonderful? No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well atlast as the truth. This alone wears well. For the most part, we arenot where we are, but in a false position. Through an infinity ofour natures, we suppose a case, and put ourselves into it, and henceare in two cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult to getout. In sane moments we regard only the facts, the case that is. Saywhat you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better thanmake-believe. Tom Hyde, the tinker, standing on the gallows, was askedif he had anything to say. "Tell the tailors," said he, "to rememberto make a knot in their thread before they take the first stitch." Hiscompanion's prayer is forgotten. However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it andcall it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest whenyou are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise.Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant,thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-house. The setting sun isreflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from therich man's abode; the snow melts before its door as early in thespring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there,and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace. The town's poor seem tome often to live the most independent lives of any. Maybe they aresimply great enough to receive without misgiving. Most think that theyare above being supported by the town; but it oftener happens thatthey are not above supporting themselves by dishonest means, whichshould be more disreputable. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb,like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whetherclothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do notchange; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. Godwill see that you do not want society. If I were confined to acorner of a garret all my days, like a spider, the world would be justas large to me while I had my thoughts about me. The philosopher said:"From an army of three divisions one can take away its general, andput it in disorder; from the man the most abject and vulgar one cannottake away his thought." Do not seek so anxiously to be developed, tosubject yourself to many influences to be played on; it is alldissipation. Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights. Theshadows of poverty and meanness gather around us, "and lo! creationwidens to our view." We are often reminded that if there were bestowedon us the wealth of Croesus, our aims must still be the same, andour means essentially the same. Moreover, if you are restricted inyour range by poverty, if you cannot buy books and newspapers, forinstance, you are but confined to the most significant and vitalexperiences; you are compelled to deal with the material whichyields the most sugar and the most starch. It is life near the bonewhere it is sweetest. You are defended from being a trifler. No manloses ever on a lower level by magnanimity on a higher. Superfluouswealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy onenecessary of the soul. I live in the angle of a leaden wall, into whose composition waspoured a little alloy of bell-metal. Often, in the repose of mymid-day, there reaches my ears a confused tintinnabulum fromwithout. It is the noise of my contemporaries. My neighbors tell me oftheir adventures with famous gentlemen and ladies, what notabilitiesthey met at the dinner-table; but I am no more interested in suchthings than in the contents of the Daily Times. The interest and theconversation are about costume and manners chiefly; but a goose is agoose still, dress it as you will. They tell me of California andTexas, of England and the Indies, of the Hon. Mr.-- of Georgia or ofMassachusetts, all transient and fleeting phenomena, till I am readyto leap from their court-yard like the Mameluke bey. I delight to cometo my bearings- not walk in procession with pomp and parade, in aconspicuous place, but to walk even with the Builder of theuniverse, if I may- not to live in this restless, nervous, bustling,trivial Nineteenth Century, but stand or sit thoughtfully while itgoes by. What are men celebrating? They are all on a committee ofarrangements, and hourly expect a speech from somebody. God is onlythe president of the day, and Webster is his orator. I love toweigh, to settle, to gravitate toward that which most strongly andrightfully attracts me;- not hang by the beam of the scale and tryto weigh less- not suppose a case, but take the case that is; totravel the only path I can, and that on which no power can resistme. It affords me no satisfaction to commerce to spring an arch beforeI have got a solid foundation. Let us not play at kittly-benders.There is a solid bottom everywhere. We read that the traveller askedthe boy if the swamp before him had a hard bottom. The boy repliedthat it had. But presently the traveller's horse sank in up to thegirths, and he observed to the boy, "I thought you said that thisbog had a hard bottom." "So it has," answered the latter, "but youhave not got half way to it yet." So it is with the bogs andquicksands of society; but he is an old boy that knows it. Only whatis thought, said, or done at a certain rare coincidence is good. Iwould not be one of those who will foolishly drive a nail into merelath and plastering; such a deed would keep me awake nights. Give me ahammer, and let me feel for the furring. Do not depend on the putty.Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake upin the night and think of your work with satisfaction- a work at whichyou would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse. So will help you God, andso only. Every nail driven should be as another rivet in the machineof the universe, you carrying on the work. Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I sat at atable where were rich food and wine in abundance, and obsequiousattendance, but sincerity and truth were not; and I went away hungryfrom the inhospitable board. The hospitality was as cold as theices. I thought that there was no need of ice to freeze them. Theytalked to me of the age of the wine and the fame of the vintage; but Ithought of an older, a newer, and purer wine, of a more gloriousvintage, which they had not got, and could not buy. The style, thehouse and grounds and "entertainment" pass for nothing with me. Icalled on the king, but he made me wait in his hall, and conductedlike a man incapacitated for hospitality. There was a man in myneighborhood who lived in a hollow tree. His manners were truly regal.I should have done better had I called on him. How long shall we sit in our porticoes practising idle and mustyvirtues, which any work would make impertinent? As if one were tobegin the day with long-suffering, and hire a man to hoe his potatoes;and in the afternoon go forth to practise Christian meekness andcharity with goodness aforethought! Consider the China pride andstagnant self-complacency of mankind. This generation inclines alittle to congratulate itself on being the last of an illustriousline; and in Boston and London and Paris and Rome, thinking of itslong descent, it speaks of its progress in art and science andliterature with satisfaction. There are the Records of thePhilosophical Societies, and the public Eulogies of Great Men! It isthe good Adam contemplating his own virtue. "Yes, we have done greatdeeds, and sung divine songs, which shall never die"- that is, as longas we can remember them. The learned societies and great men ofAssyria- where are they? What youthful philosophers andexperimentalists we are! There is not one of my readers who has yetlived a whole human life. These may be but the spring months in thelife of the race. If we have had the seven-years' itch, we have notseen the seventeen-year locust yet in Concord. We are acquaintedwith a mere pellicle of the globe on which we live. Most have notdelved six feet beneath the surface, nor leaped as many above it. Weknow not where we are. Beside, we are sound asleep nearly half ourtime. Yet we esteem ourselves wise, and have an established order onthe surface. Truly, we are deep thinkers, we are ambitious spirits! AsI stand over the insect crawling amid the pine needles on the forestfloor, and endeavoring to conceal itself from my sight, and ask myselfwhy it will cherish those humble thoughts, and bide its head from mewho might, perhaps, be its benefactor, and impart to its race somecheering information, I am reminded of the greater Benefactor andIntelligence that stands over me the human insect. There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet wetolerate incredible dulness. I need only suggest what kind ofsermons are still listened to in the most enlightened countries. Thereare such words as joy and sorrow, but they are only the burden of apsalm, sung with a nasal twang, while we believe in the ordinary andmean. We think that we can change our clothes only. It is said thatthe British Empire is very large and respectable, and that theUnited States are a first-rate power. We do not believe that a tiderises and falls behind every man which can float the British Empirelike a chip, if he should ever harbor it in his mind. Who knows whatsort of seventeen-year locust will next come out of the ground? Thegovernment of the world I live in was not framed, like that ofBritain, in after-dinner conversations over the wine. The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this yearhigher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; eventhis may be the eventful year, which will drown out all ourmuskrats. It was not always dry land where we dwell. I see farinland the banks which the stream anciently washed, before sciencebegan to record its freshets. Every one has heard the story whichhas gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bugwhich came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood,which had stood in a farmer's kitchen for sixty years, first inConnecticut, and afterward in Massachusetts- from an egg depositedin the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by countingthe annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for severalweeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who does not feelhis faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing ofthis? Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has beenburied for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the deaddry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the greenand living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblanceof its well-seasoned tomb- heard perchance gnawing out now for yearsby the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festiveboard- may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society's mosttrivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer lifeat last! I do not say that John or Jonathan will realize all this; but suchis the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can nevermake to dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us.Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day todawn. The sun is but a morning star. THE END