Message #136453

[Mindwarp]

HOUSE-WARMING.

  IN OCTOBER I went a-graping to the river meadows, and loaded
myself with clusters more precious for their beauty and fragrance than
for food. There, too, I admired, though I did not gather, the
cranberries, small waxen gems, pendants of the meadow grass, pearly
and red, which the farmer plucks with an ugly rake, leaving the smooth
meadow in a snarl, heedlessly measuring them by the bushel and the
dollar only, and sells the spoils of the meads to Boston and New York;
destined to be jammed, to satisfy the tastes of lovers of Nature
there. So butchers rake the tongues of bison out of the prairie grass,
regardless of the torn and drooping plant. The barberry's brilliant
fruit was likewise food for my eyes merely; but I collected a small
store of wild apples for coddling, which the proprietor and travellers
had overlooked. When chestnuts were ripe I laid up half a bushel for
winter. It was very exciting at that season to roam the then boundless
chestnut woods of Lincoln- they now sleep their long sleep under the
railroad- with a bag on my shoulder, and a stick to open burs with
in my hand, for I did not always wait for the frost, amid the rustling
of leaves and the loud reproofs of the red squirrels and the jays,
whose half-consumed nuts I sometimes stole, for the burs which they
had selected were sure to contain sound ones. Occasionally I climbed
and shook the trees. They grew also behind my house, and one large
tree, which almost overshadowed it, was, when in flower, a bouquet
which scented the whole neighborhood, but the squirrels and the jays
got most of its fruit; the last coming in flocks early in the
morning and picking the nuts out of the burs before they fell, I
relinquished these trees to them and visited the more distant woods
composed wholly of chestnut. These nuts, as far as they went, were a
good substitute for bread. Many other substitutes might, perhaps, be
found. Digging one day for fishworms, I discovered the groundnut
(Apios tuberosa) on its string, the potato of the aborigines, a sort
of fabulous fruit, which I had begun to doubt if I had ever dug and
eaten in childhood, as I had told, and had not dreamed it. I had often
since seen its crumpled red velvety blossom supported by the stems
of other plants without knowing it to be the same. Cultivation has
well-nigh exterminated it. It has a sweetish taste, much like that
of a frost-bitten potato, and I found it better boiled than roasted.
This tuber seemed like a faint promise of Nature to rear her own
children and feed them simply here at some future period. In these
days of fatted cattle and waving grain-fields this humble root,
which was once the totem of an Indian tribe, is quite forgotten, or
known only by its flowering vine; but let wild Nature reign here
once more, and the tender and luxurious English grains will probably
disappear before a myriad of foes, and without the care of man the
crow may carry back even the last seed of corn to the great
cornfield of the Indian's God in the southwest, whence he is said to
have brought it; but the now almost exterminated ground-nut will
perhaps revive and flourish in spite of frosts and wildness, prove
itself indigenous, and resume its ancient importance and dignity as
the diet of the hunter tribe. Some Indian Ceres or Minerva must have
been the inventor and bestower of it; and when the reign of poetry
commences here, its leaves and string of nuts may be represented on
our works of art.

  Already, by the first of September, I had seen two or three small
maples turned scarlet across the pond, beneath where the white stems
of three aspens diverged, at the point of a promontory, next the
water. Ah, many a tale their color told! Arid gradually from week to
week the character of each tree came out, and it admired itself
reflected in the smooth mirror of the lake. Each morning the manager
of this gallery substituted some new picture, distinguished by more
brilliant or harmonious coloring, for the old upon the walls.

  The wasps came by thousands to my lodge in October, as to winter
quarters, and settled on my windows within and on the walls
overhead, sometimes deterring visitors from entering. Each morning,
when they were numbed with cold, I swept some of them out, but I did
not trouble myself much to get rid of them; I even felt complimented
by their regarding my house as a desirable shelter. They never
molested me seriously, though they bedded with me; and they
gradually disappeared, into what crevices I do not know, avoiding
winter and unspeakable cold.

  Like the wasps, before I finally went into winter quarters in
November, I used to resort to the northeast side of Walden, which
the sun, reflected from the pitch pine woods and the stony shore, made
the fireside of the pond; it is so much pleasanter and wholesomer to
be warmed by the sun while you can be, than by an artificial fire. I
thus warmed myself by the still glowing embers which the summer,
like a departed hunter, had left.

  When I came to build my chimney I studied masonry. My bricks,
being second-hand ones, required to be cleaned with a trowel, so
that I learned more than usual of the qualities of bricks and trowels.
The mortar on them was fifty years old, and was said to be still
growing harder; but this is one of those sayings which men love to
repeat whether they are true or not. Such sayings themselves grow
harder and adhere more firmly with age, and it would take many blows
with a trowel to clean an old wiseacre of them. Many of the villages
of Mesopotamia are built of secondhand bricks of a very good
quality, obtained from the ruins of Babylon, and the cement on them is
older and probably harder still. However that may be, I was struck
by the peculiar toughness of the steel which bore so many violent
blows without being worn out. As my bricks had been in a chimney
before, though I did not read the name of Nebuchadnezzar on them, I
picked out its many fireplace bricks as I could find, to save work and
waste, and I filled the spaces between the bricks about the
fireplace with stones from the pond shore, and also made my mortar
with the white sand from the same place. I lingered most about the
fireplace, as the most vital part of the house. Indeed, I worked so
deliberately, that though I commenced at the ground in the morning,
a course of bricks raised a few inches above the floor served for my
pillow at night; yet I did not get a stiff neck for it that I
remember; my stiff neck is of older date. I took a poet to board for a
fortnight about those times, which caused me to be put to it for room.
He brought his own knife, though I had two, and we used to scour
them by thrusting them into the earth. He shared with me the labors of
cooking. I was pleased to see my work rising so square and solid by
degrees, and reflected, that, if it proceeded slowly, it was
calculated to endure a long time. The chimney is to some extent an
independent structure, standing on the ground, and rising through
the house to the heavens; even after the house is burned it still
stands sometimes, and its importance and independence are apparent.
This was toward the end of summer. It was now November.

  The north wind had already begun to cool the pond, though it took
many weeks of steady blowing to accomplish it, it is so deep. When I
began to have a fire at evening, before I plastered my house, the
chimney carried smoke particularly well, because of the numerous
chinks between the boards. Yet I passed some cheerful evenings in that
cool and airy apartment, surrounded by the rough brown boards full
of knots, and rafters with the bark on high overhead. My house never
pleased my eye so much after it was plastered, though I was obliged to
confess that it was more comfortable. Should not every apartment in
which man dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead,
where flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters?
These forms are more agreeable to the fancy and imagination than
fresco paintings or other the most expensive furniture. I now first
began to inhabit my house, I may say, when I began to use it for
warmth as well as shelter. I had got a couple of old fire-dogs to keep
the wood from the hearth, and it did me good to see the soot form on
the back of the chimney which I had built, and I poked the fire with
more right and more satisfaction than usual. My dwelling was small,
and I could hardly entertain an echo in it; but it seemed larger for
being a single apartment and remote from neighbors. All the
attractions of a house were concentrated in one room; it was
kitchen, chamber, parlor, and keeping-room; and whatever
satisfaction parent or child, master or servant, derive from living in
a house, I enjoyed it all. Cato says, the master of a family
(patremfamilias) must have in his rustic villa "cellam oleariam,
vinariam, dolia multa, uti lubeat caritatem expectare, et rei, et
virtuti, et gloriae erit," that is, "an oil and wine cellar, many
casks, so that it may be pleasant to expect hard times; it will be for
his advantage, and virtue, and glory." I had in my cellar a firkin
of potatoes, about two quarts of peas with the weevil in them, and
on my shelf a little rice, a jug of molasses, and of rye and Indian
meal a peck each.

  I sometimes dream of a larger and more populous house, standing in a
golden age, of enduring materials, and without gingerbread work, which
shall still consist of only one room, a vast, rude, substantial,
primitive hall, without ceiling or plastering, with bare rafters and
purlins supporting a sort of lower heaven over one's head-useful to
keep off rain and snow, where the king and queen posts stand out to
receive your homage, when you have done reverence to the prostrate
Saturn of an older dynasty on stepping over the sill; a cavernous
house, wherein you must reach up a torch upon a pole to see the
roof; where some may live in the fireplace, some in the recess of a
window, and some on settles, some at one end of the hall, some at
another, and some aloft on rafters with the spiders, if they choose; a
house which you have got into when you have opened the outside door,
and the ceremony is over; where the weary traveller may wash, and eat,
and converse, and sleep, without further journey; such a shelter as
you would be glad to reach in a tempestuous night, containing all
the essentials of a house, and nothing for house-keeping; where you
can see all the treasures of the house at one view, and everything
hangs upon its peg, that a man should use; at once kitchen, pantry,
parlor, chamber, storehouse, and garret; where you can see so
necessary a thin, as a barrel or a ladder, so convenient a thing as
a cupboard, and hear the pot boil, and pay your respects to the fire
that cooks your dinner, and the oven that bakes your bread, and the
necessary furniture and utensils are the chief ornaments; where the
washing is not put out, nor the fire, nor the mistress, and perhaps
you are sometimes requested to move from off the trapdoor, when the
cook would descend into the cellar, and so learn whether the ground is
solid or hollow beneath you without stamping. A house whose inside
is as open and manifest as a bird's nest, and you cannot go in at
the front door and out at the back without seeing some of its
inhabitants; where to be a guest is to be presented with the freedom
of the house, and not to be carefully excluded from seven eighths of
it, shut up in a particular cell, and told to make yourself at home
therein solitary confinement. Nowadays the host does not admit you
to his hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourself
somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art of keeping you at
the greatest distance. There is as much secrecy about the cooking as
if he had a design to poison you. I am aware that I have been on
many a man's premises, and might have been legally ordered off, but
I am not aware that I have been in many men's houses. I might visit in
my old clothes a king and queen who lived simply in such a house as
I have described, if I were going their way; but backing out of a
modern palace will be all that I shall desire to learn, if ever I am
caught in one.