youth at last grows indifferent, the laws of the universe are not
indifferent, but are forever on the side of the most sensitive. Listen
to every zephyr for some reproof, for it is surely there, and he is
unfortunate who does not hear it. We cannot touch a string or move a
stop but the charming moral transfixes us. Many an irksome noise, go a
long way off, is heard as music, a proud sweet satire on the meanness
of our lives.

We are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in proportion as our
higher nature slumbers. It is reptile and sensual, and perhaps cannot
be wholly expelled; like the worms which, even in life and health,
occupy our bodies. Possibly we may withdraw from it, but never change
its nature. I fear that it may enjoy a certain health of its own; that
we may be well, yet not pure. The other day I picked up the lower jaw
of a hog, with white and sound teeth and tusks, which suggested that
there was an animal health and vigor distinct from the spiritual. This
creature succeeded by other means than temperance and purity. “That in
which men differ from brute beasts,” says Mencius, “is a thing very
inconsiderable; the common herd lose it very soon; superior men
preserve it carefully.” Who knows what sort of life would result if we
had attained to purity? If I knew so wise a man as could teach me
purity I would go to seek him forthwith. “A command over our passions,
and over the external senses of the body, and good acts, are declared
by the Ved to be indispensable in the mind’s approximation to God.” Yet
the spirit can for the time pervade and control every member and
function of the body, and transmute what in form is the grossest
sensuality into purity and devotion. The generative energy, which, when
we are loose, dissipates and makes us unclean, when we are continent
invigorates and inspires us. Chastity is the flowering of man; and what
are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various
fruits which succeed it. Man flows at once to God when the channel of
purity is open. By turns our purity inspires and our impurity casts us
down. He is blessed who is assured that the animal is dying out in him
day by day, and the divine being established. Perhaps there is none but
has cause for shame on account of the inferior and brutish nature to
which he is allied. I fear that we are such gods or demigods only as
fauns and satyrs, the divine allied to beasts, the creatures of
appetite, and that, to some extent, our very life is our disgrace.—

     “How happy’s he who hath due place assigned
     To his beasts and disafforested his mind!
                *    *    *    *    *
     Can use this horse, goat, wolf, and ev’ry beast,
     And is not ass himself to all the rest!
     Else man not only is the herd of swine,
     But he’s those devils too which did incline
     Them to a headlong rage, and made them worse.”

All sensuality is one, though it takes many forms; all purity is one.
It is the same whether a man eat, or drink, or cohabit, or sleep
sensually. They are but one appetite, and we only need to see a person
do any one of these things to know how great a sensualist he is. The
impure can neither stand nor sit with purity. When the reptile is
attacked at one mouth of his burrow, he shows himself at another. If
you would be chaste, you must be temperate. What is chastity? How shall
a man know if he is chaste? He shall not know it. We have heard of this
virtue, but we know not what it is. We speak conformably to the rumor
which we have heard. From exertion come wisdom and purity; from sloth
ignorance and sensuality. In the student sensuality is a sluggish habit
of mind. An unclean person is universally a slothful one, one who sits
by a stove, whom the sun shines on prostrate, who reposes without being
fatigued. If you would avoid uncleanness, and all the sins, work
earnestly, though it be at cleaning a stable. Nature is hard to be
overcome, but she must be overcome. What avails it that you are
Christian, if you are not purer than the heathen, if you deny yourself
no more, if you are not more religious? I know of many systems of
religion esteemed heathenish whose precepts fill the reader with shame,
and provoke him to new endeavors, though it be to the performance of
rites merely.

I hesitate to say these things, but it is not because of the subject,—I
care not how obscene my _words_ are,—but because I cannot speak of them
without betraying my impurity. We discourse freely without shame of one
form of sensuality, and are silent about another. We are so degraded
that we cannot speak simply of the necessary functions of human nature.
In earlier ages, in some countries, every function was reverently
spoken of and regulated by law. Nothing was too trivial for the Hindoo
lawgiver, however offensive it may be to modern taste. He teaches how
to eat, drink, cohabit, void excrement and urine, and the like,
elevating what is mean, and does not falsely excuse himself by calling
these things trifles.

Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he
worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammering
marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is
our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to
refine a man’s features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.

John Farmer sat at his door one September evening, after a hard day’s
work, his mind still running on his labor more or less. Having bathed,
he sat down to re-create his intellectual man. It was a rather cool
evening, and some of his neighbors were apprehending a frost. He had
not attended to the train of his thoughts long when he heard some one
playing on a flute, and that sound harmonized with his mood. Still he
thought of his work; but the burden of his thought was, that though
this kept running in his head, and he found himself planning and
contriving it against his will, yet it concerned him very little. It
was no more than the scurf of his skin, which was constantly shuffled
off. But the notes of the flute came home to his ears out of a
different sphere from that he worked in, and suggested work for certain
faculties which slumbered in him. They gently did away with the street,
and the village, and the state in which he lived. A voice said to
him,—Why do you stay here and live this mean moiling life, when a
glorious existence is possible for you? Those same stars twinkle over
other fields than these.—But how to come out of this condition and
actually migrate thither? All that he could think of was to practise
some new austerity, to let his mind descend into his body and redeem
it, and treat himself with ever increasing respect.

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 O, 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 tree; and then for morning calls and
dinner-parties! Only a woodpecker tapping. O, 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 hound 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 sweet-briers tremble.—Eh, Mr. Poet, is it you? How do you like the
world to-day?

_Poet._ See those clouds; how they hang! That’s the greatest thing I
have seen to-day. There’s nothing like it in old paintings, nothing
like 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 to-day, 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. Angle-worms 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 to-day. I would advise you to set in the spade down yonder
among the ground-nuts, 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 Con-fut-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
bopeep 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 phœbe 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 wood-cock led her brood, to
probe the mud for worms, flying but a foot 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
wood-yard, 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
noon-day 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 bull-dogs. Neither manifested the least
disposition to retreat. It was evident that their battle-cry was
Conquer or die. In the mean while there came along a single red ant on
the hill-side 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 he 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 on 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 Huber is
the only modern author who appears to have witnessed them. “Æneas
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 before the 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 lain 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 more than a year before, in April, and
was finally taken into their house; 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 one
loon. 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 manœuvre, 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 wild 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 manœuvred 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 as 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 a long-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 the loon 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 veer
and 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 to
other 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 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 burrs with in my hand, for I did
not always wait for the frost, amid the rustling of leaves and the loud
reproofs of the red-squirrels and the jays, whose half-consumed nuts I
sometimes stole, for the burrs which they had selected were 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 burrs 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 fish-worms, I
discovered the ground-nut (_Apios tuberosa_) on its string, the potato
of the aborigines, a sort of fabulous fruit, which I had begun to doubt
if I had ever dug and eaten in childhood, as I had told, and had not
dreamed it. I had often since seen its crimpled 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 frostbitten 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 south-west, 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! And gradually from week to week the
character of each tree came out, and it admired itself reflected in the
smooth mirror of the lake. Each morning the manager of 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 over-head,
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 north-east side of Walden, which the sun,
reflected from the pitch-pine woods and the stony shore, made the
fire-side 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 second-hand bricks of a very good quality, obtained from
the ruins of Babylon, and the cement on them is older and probably
harder still. However that may be, I was struck by the peculiar
toughness of the steel which bore so many violent blows without being
worn out. As my bricks had been in a chimney before, though I did not
read the name of Nebuchadnezzar on them, I picked out as many
fire-place bricks as I could find, to save work and waste, and I filled
the spaces between the bricks about the fire-place 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 over-head, 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 gloriæ 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 ginger-bread 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 fire-place, 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 every thing hangs upon
its peg, that a man should use; at once kitchen, pantry, parlor,
chamber, store-house, and garret; where you can see so necessary a
thing as a barrel or a ladder, so convenient a thing as a cupboard, and
hear the pot boil, and pay 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 trap-door, 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 there,—in solitary confinement. Nowadays
the host does not admit you to _his_ hearth, but has got the mason to
build one for yourself somewhere 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.

It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its
nerve and degenerate into _palaver_ wholly, our lives pass at such
remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are
necessarily so far fetched, through slides and dumb-waiters, as it
were; in other words, the parlor is so far from the kitchen and
workshop. The dinner even is only the parable of a dinner, commonly. As
if only the savage dwelt near enough to Nature and Truth to borrow a
trope from them. How can the scholar, who dwells away in the North West
Territory or the Isle of Man, tell what is parliamentary in the
kitchen?

However, only one or two of my guests were ever bold enough to stay and
eat a hasty-pudding with me; but when they saw that crisis approaching
they beat a hasty retreat rather, as if it would shake the house to its
foundations. Nevertheless, it stood through a great many
hasty-puddings.

I did not plaster till it was freezing weather. I brought over some
whiter and cleaner sand for this purpose from the opposite shore of the
pond in a boat, a sort of conveyance which would have tempted me to go
much farther if necessary. My house had in the mean while been shingled
down to the ground on every side. In lathing I was pleased to be able
to send home each nail with a single blow of the hammer, and it was my
ambition to transfer the plaster from the board to the wall neatly and
rapidly. I remembered the story of a conceited fellow, who, in fine
clothes, was wont to lounge about the village once, giving advice to
workmen. Venturing one day to substitute deeds for words, he turned up
his cuffs, seized a plasterer’s board, and having loaded his trowel
without mishap, with a complacent look toward the lathing overhead,
made a bold gesture thitherward; and straightway, to his complete
discomfiture, received the whole contents in his ruffled bosom. I
admired anew the economy and convenience of plastering, which so
effectually shuts out the cold and takes a handsome finish, and I
learned the various casualties to which the plasterer is liable. I was
surprised to see how thirsty the bricks were which drank up all the
moisture in my plaster before I had smoothed it, and how many pailfuls
of water it takes to christen a new hearth. I had the previous winter
made a small quantity of lime by burning the shells of the _Unio
fluviatilis_, which our river affords, for the sake of the experiment;
so that I knew where my materials came from. I might have got good
limestone within a mile or two and burned it myself, if I had cared to
do so.

The pond had in the mean while skimmed over in the shadiest and
shallowest coves, some days or even weeks before the general freezing.
The first ice is especially interesting and perfect, being hard, dark,
and transparent, and affords the best opportunity that ever offers for
examining the bottom where it is shallow; for you can lie at your
length on ice only an inch thick, like a skater insect on the surface
of the water, and study the bottom at your leisure, only two or three
inches distant, like a picture behind a glass, and the water is
necessarily always smooth then. There are many furrows in the sand
where some creature has travelled about and doubled on its tracks; and,
for wrecks, it is strewn with the cases of cadis worms made of minute
grains of white quartz. Perhaps these have creased it, for you find
some of their cases in the furrows, though they are deep and broad for
them to make. But the ice itself is the object of most interest, though
you must improve the earliest opportunity to study it. If you examine
it closely the morning after it freezes, you find that the greater part
of the bubbles, which at first appeared to be within it, are against
its under surface, and that more are continually rising from the
bottom; while the ice is as yet comparatively solid and dark, that is,
you see the water through it. These bubbles are from an eightieth to an
eighth of an inch in diameter, very clear and beautiful, and you see
your face reflected in them through the ice. There may be thirty or
forty of them to a square inch. There are also already within the ice
narrow oblong perpendicular bubbles about half an inch long, sharp
cones with the apex upward; or oftener, if the ice is quite fresh,
minute spherical bubbles one directly above another, like a string of
beads. But these within the ice are not so numerous nor obvious as
those beneath. I sometimes used to cast on stones to try the strength
of the ice, and those which broke through carried in air with them,
which formed very large and conspicuous white bubbles beneath. One day
when I came to the same place forty-eight hours afterward, I found that
those large bubbles were still perfect, though an inch more of ice had
formed, as I could see distinctly by the seam in the edge of a cake.
But as the last two days had been very warm, like an Indian summer, the
ice was not now transparent, showing the dark green color of the water,
and the bottom, but opaque and whitish or gray, and though twice as
thick was hardly stronger than before, for the air bubbles had greatly
expanded under this heat and run together, and lost their regularity;
they were no longer one directly over another, but often like silvery
coins poured from a bag, one overlapping another, or in thin flakes, as
if occupying slight cleavages. The beauty of the ice was gone, and it
was too late to study the bottom. Being curious to know what position
my great bubbles occupied with regard to the new ice, I broke out a
cake containing a middling sized one, and turned it bottom upward. The
new ice had formed around and under the bubble, so that it was included
between the two ices. It was wholly in the lower ice, but close against
the upper, and was flattish, or perhaps slightly lenticular, with a
rounded edge, a quarter of an inch deep by four inches in diameter; and
I was surprised to find that directly under the bubble the ice was
melted with great regularity in the form of a saucer reversed, to the
height of five eighths of an inch in the middle, leaving a thin
partition there between the water and the bubble, hardly an eighth of
an inch thick; and in many places the small bubbles in this partition
had burst out downward, and probably there was no ice at all under the
largest bubbles, which were a foot in diameter. I inferred that the
infinite number of minute bubbles which I had first seen against the
under surface of the ice were now frozen in likewise, and that each, in
its degree, had operated like a burning glass on the ice beneath to
melt and rot it. These are the little air-guns which contribute to make
the ice crack and whoop.

At length the winter set in in good earnest, just as I had finished
plastering, and the wind began to howl around the house as if it had
not had permission to do so till then. Night after night the geese came
lumbering in 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 for Mexico.
Several times, when returning from the village at ten or eleven o’clock
at night, I heard the tread of a flock of geese, or else ducks, on the
dry leaves in the woods by a pond-hole behind my dwelling, where they
had come up to feed, and the faint honk or quack of their leader as
they hurried off. In 1845 Walden froze entirely over for the first time
on the night of the 22d of December, Flint’s and other shallower ponds
and the river having been frozen ten days or more; in ’46, the 16th; in
’49, about the 31st; and in ’50, about the 27th of December; in ’52,
the 5th of January; in ’53, the 31st of December. The snow had already
covered the ground since the 25th of November, and surrounded me
suddenly with the scenery of winter. I withdrew yet farther into my
shell, and endeavored to keep a bright fire both within my house and
within my breast. My employment out of doors now was to collect the
dead wood in the forest, bringing it in my hands or on my shoulders, or
sometimes trailing a dead pine tree under each arm to my shed. An old
forest fence which had seen its best days was a great haul for me. I
sacrificed it to Vulcan, for it was past serving the god Terminus. How
much more interesting an event is that man’s supper who has just been
forth in the snow to hunt, nay, you might say, steal, the fuel to cook
it with! His bread and meat are sweet. There are enough fagots and
waste wood of all kinds in the forests of most of our towns to support
many fires, but which at present warm none, and, some think, hinder the
growth of the young wood. There was also the drift-wood of the pond. In
the course of the summer I had discovered a raft of pitch-pine logs
with the bark on, pinned together by the Irish when the railroad was
built. This I hauled up partly on the shore. After soaking two years
and then lying high six months it was perfectly sound, though
waterlogged past drying. I amused myself one winter day with sliding
this piecemeal across the pond, nearly half a mile, skating behind with
one end of a log fifteen feet long on my shoulder, and the other on the
ice; or I tied several logs together with a birch withe, and then, with
a longer birch or alder which had a hook at the end, dragged them
across. Though completely waterlogged and almost as heavy as lead, they
not only burned long, but made a very hot fire; nay, I thought that
they burned better for the soaking, as if the pitch, being confined by
the water, burned longer, as in a lamp.

Gilpin, in his account of the forest borderers of England, says that
“the encroachments of trespassers, and the houses and fences thus
raised on the borders of the forest,” were “considered as great
nuisances by the old forest law, and were severely punished under the
name of _purprestures_, as tending _ad terrorem ferarum—ad nocumentum
forestæ_, &c.,” to the frightening of the game and the detriment of the
forest. But I was interested in the preservation of the venison and the
vert more than the hunters or woodchoppers, and as much as though I had
been the Lord Warden himself; and if any part was burned, though I
burned it myself by accident, I grieved with a grief that lasted longer
and was more inconsolable than that of the proprietors; nay, I grieved
when it was cut down by the proprietors themselves. I would that our
farmers when they cut down a forest felt some of that awe which the old
Romans did when they came to thin, or let in the light to, a
consecrated grove (_lucum conlucare_), that is, would believe that it
is sacred to some god. The Roman made an expiatory offering, and
prayed, Whatever god or goddess thou art to whom this grove is sacred,
be propitious to me, my family, and children, &c.

It is remarkable what a value is still put upon wood even in this age
and in this new country, a value more permanent and universal than that
of gold. After all our discoveries and inventions no man will go by a
pile of wood. It is as precious to us as it was to our Saxon and Norman
ancestors. If they made their bows of it, we make our gun-stocks of it.
Michaux, more than thirty years ago, says that the price of wood for
fuel in New York and Philadelphia “nearly equals, and sometimes
exceeds, that of the best wood in Paris, though this immense capital
annually requires more than three hundred thousand cords, and is
surrounded to the distance of three hundred miles by cultivated
plains.” In this town the price of wood rises almost steadily, and the
only question is, how much higher it is to be this year than it was the
last. Mechanics and tradesmen who come in person to the forest on no
other errand, are sure to attend the wood auction, and even pay a high
price for the privilege of gleaning after the woodchopper. It is now
many years that men have resorted to the forest for fuel and the
materials of the arts; the New Englander and the New Hollander, the
Parisian and the Celt, the farmer and Robinhood, Goody Blake and Harry
Gill, in most parts of the world the prince and the peasant, the
scholar and the savage, equally require still a few sticks from the
forest to warm them and cook their food. Neither could I do without
them.

Every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affection. I love to
have mine before my window, and the more chips the better to remind me
of my pleasing work. I had an old axe which nobody claimed, with which
by spells in winter days, on the sunny side of the house, I played
about the stumps which I had got out of my bean-field. As my driver
prophesied when I was ploughing, they warmed me twice, once while I was
splitting them, and again when they were on the fire, so that no fuel
could give out more heat. As for the axe, I was advised to get the
village blacksmith to “jump” it; but I jumped him, and, putting a
hickory helve from the woods into it, made it do. If it was dull, it
was at least hung true.

A few pieces of fat pine were a great treasure. It is interesting to
remember how much of this food for fire is still concealed in the
bowels of the earth. In previous years I had often gone “prospecting”
over some bare hill-side, where a pitch-pine wood had formerly stood,
and got out the fat pine roots. They are almost indestructible. Stumps
thirty or forty years old, at least, will still be sound at the core,
though the sapwood has all become vegetable mould, as appears by the
scales of the thick bark forming a ring level with the earth four or
five inches distant from the heart. With axe and shovel you explore
this mine, and follow the marrowy store, yellow as beef tallow, or as
if you had struck on a vein of gold, deep into the earth. But commonly
I kindled my fire with the dry leaves of the forest, which I had stored
up in my shed before the snow came. Green hickory finely split makes
the woodchopper’s kindlings, when he has a camp in the woods. Once in a
while I got a little of this. When the villagers were lighting their
fires beyond the horizon, I too gave notice to the various wild
inhabitants of Walden vale, by a smoky streamer from my chimney, that I
was awake.—

     Light-winged Smoke, Icarian bird,
     Melting thy pinions in thy 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, answered my
purpose better than any other. I sometimes left a good fire when I went
to take a walk in a winter afternoon; and when I returned, three or
four hours afterward, it would be still alive and glowing. My house was
not empty though I was gone. It was as if I had left a cheerful
housekeeper behind. It was I and Fire that lived there; and commonly my
housekeeper proved trustworthy. One day, however, as I was splitting
wood, I thought that I would just look in at the window and see if the
house was not on fire; it was the only time I remember to have been
particularly anxious on this score; so I looked and saw that a spark
had caught my bed, and I went in and extinguished it when it had burned
a place as big as my hand. But my house occupied so sunny and sheltered
a position, and its roof was so low, that I could afford to let the
fire go out in the middle of almost any winter day.

The moles nested in my cellar, nibbling every third potato, and making
a snug bed even there of some hair left after plastering and of brown
paper; for even the wildest animals love comfort and warmth as well as
man, and they survive the winter only because they are so careful to
secure them. Some of my friends spoke as if I was coming to the woods
on purpose to freeze myself. The animal merely makes a bed, which he
warms with his body, in a sheltered place; but man, having discovered
fire, boxes up some air in a spacious apartment, and warms that,
instead of robbing himself, makes that his bed, in which he can move
about divested of more cumbrous clothing, maintain a kind of summer in
the midst of winter, and by means of windows even admit the light, and
with a lamp lengthen out the day. Thus he goes a step or two beyond
instinct, and saves a little time for the fine arts. Though, when I had
been exposed to the rudest blasts a long time, my whole body began to
grow torpid, when I reached the genial atmosphere of my house I soon
recovered my faculties and prolonged my life. But the most luxuriously
housed has little to boast of in this respect, nor need we trouble
ourselves to speculate how the human race may be at last destroyed. It
would be easy to cut their threads any time with a little sharper blast
from the north. We go on dating from Cold Fridays and Great Snows; but
a little colder Friday, or greater snow, would put a period to man’s
existence on the globe.

The next winter I used a small cooking-stove for economy, since I did
not own the forest; but it did not keep fire so well as the open
fire-place. Cooking was then, for the most part, no longer a poetic,
but merely a chemic process. It will soon be forgotten, in these days
of stoves, that we used to roast potatoes in the ashes, after the
Indian fashion. The stove not only took up room and scented the house,
but it concealed the fire, and I felt as if I had lost a companion. You
can always see a face in the fire. The laborer, looking into it at
evening, purifies his thoughts of the dross and earthiness which they
have accumulated during the day. But I could no longer sit and look
into the fire, and the pertinent words of a poet recurred to me with
new force.—

     “Never, bright flame, may be denied to me
     Thy dear, life imaging, close sympathy.
     What but my hopes shot upward 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 fire-side, 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 dry 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 grow 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 golden-rod (_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 earthen ware, 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
great coat in mid-summer, 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
over-run 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, thimble-berries,
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, in front-yard plots,—now standing by wall-sides 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 low-land
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
hills when the snow 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 he preserved a
peninsular 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 north-west 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 mid-winter, 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.—

     “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 scared 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 every where, I sometimes expected the Visitor who never
comes. The Vishnu Purana says, “The house-holder is to remain at
eventide in his court-yard 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 manœuvres. 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 fixed 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 top-most 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 tit-mice
came daily to pick a dinner out of my wood-pile, 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
spring-like days, a wiry summery _phe-be_ from the wood-side. 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 hill-side 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 sun-beams 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 Actæon. 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
he would run in a straight line away no fox-hound 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 every thing 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 ground, 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 farm-house
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 fox-hound 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 ½ a Catt
skin 0—1—4½;” 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 deer skins 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 road-side 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 mid-summer,
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 ground 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, asserting 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 some
question had been put to me, which I had been endeavoring in vain to
answer in my sleep, as what—how—when—where? But there was dawning
Nature, in whom all creatures live, looking in at my broad windows with
serene and satisfied face, and no question on _her_ lips. I awoke to an
answered question, to Nature and daylight. The snow lying deep on the
earth dotted with young pines, and the very slope of the hill on which
my house is placed, seemed to say, Forward! Nature puts no question and
answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her
resolution. “O Prince, our eyes contemplate with admiration and
transmit to the soul the wonderful and varied spectacle of this
universe. The night veils without doubt a part of this glorious
creation; but day comes to reveal to us this great work, which extends
from earth even into the plains of the ether.”

Then to my morning work. First I take an axe and pail and go in search
of water, if that be not a dream. After a cold and snowy night it
needed a divining rod to find it. Every winter the liquid and trembling
surface of the pond, which was so sensitive to every breath, and
reflected every light and shadow, becomes solid to the depth of a foot
or a foot and a half, so that it will support the heaviest teams, and
perchance the snow covers it to an equal depth, and it is not to be
distinguished from any level field. Like the marmots in the surrounding
hills, it closes its eye-lids and becomes dormant for three months or
more. Standing on the snow-covered plain, as if in a pasture amid the
hills, I cut my way first through a foot of snow, and then a foot of
ice, and open a window under my feet, where, kneeling to drink, I look
down into the quiet parlor of the fishes, pervaded by a softened light
as through a window of ground glass, with its bright sanded floor the
same as in summer; there a perennial waveless serenity reigns as in the
amber twilight sky, corresponding to the cool and even temperament of
the inhabitants. Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.

Early in the morning, while all things are crisp with frost, men come
with fishing reels and slender lunch, and let down their fine lines
through the snowy field to take pickerel and perch; wild men, who
instinctively follow other fashions and trust other authorities than
their townsmen, and by their goings and comings stitch towns together
in parts where else they would be ripped. They sit and eat their
luncheon in stout fear-naughts on the dry oak leaves on the shore, as
wise in natural lore as the citizen is in artificial. They never
consulted with books, and know and can tell much less than they have
done. The things which they practise are said not yet to be known. Here
is one fishing for pickerel with grown perch for bait. You look into
his pail with wonder as into a summer pond, as if he kept summer locked
up at home, or knew where she had retreated. How, pray, did he get
these in mid-winter? O, he got worms out of rotten logs since the
ground froze, and so he caught them. His life itself passes deeper in
Nature than the studies of the naturalist penetrate; himself a subject
for the naturalist. The latter raises the moss and bark gently with his
knife in search of insects; the former lays open logs to their core
with his axe, and moss 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 carried out in him. The perch swallows the grub-worm, the
pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisher-man swallows the pickerel;
and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled.

When I strolled around the pond in misty weather I was sometimes amused
by the primitive mode which some ruder fisherman had adopted. He would
perhaps have placed alder branches over the narrow holes in the ice,
which were four or five rods apart and an equal distance from the
shore, and having fastened the end of the line to a stick to prevent
its being pulled through, have passed the slack line over a twig of the
alder, a foot or more above the ice, and tied a dry oak leaf to it,
which, being pulled down, would show when he had a bite. These alders
loomed through the mist at regular intervals as you walked half way
round the pond.

Ah, the pickerel of Walden! when I see them lying on the ice, or in the
well which the fisherman cuts in the ice, making a little hole 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 possess a quite dazzling
and transcendent beauty which separates them by a wide interval from
the cadaverous cod and haddock whose fame is trumpeted in our streets.
They are not green like the pines, nor gray like the stones, nor blue
like the sky; but they have, to my eyes, if possible, yet rarer colors,
like flowers and precious stones, as if they were the pearls, the
animalized _nuclei_ or crystals of the Walden water. They, of course,
are Walden all over and all through; are themselves small Waldens in
the animal kingdom, Waldenses. It is surprising that they are caught
here,—that in this deep and capacious spring, far beneath the rattling
teams and chaises and tinkling sleighs that travel the Walden road,
this great gold and emerald fish swims. I never chanced to see its kind
in any market; it would be the cynosure of all eyes there. Easily, with
a few convulsive quirks, they give up their watery ghosts, like a
mortal translated before his time to the thin air of heaven.

walden_pond_map

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, with
compass and chain and sounding line. There have been many stories told
about the bottom, or rather no bottom, of this pond, which certainly
had no foundation for themselves. It is remarkable how long men will
believe in the bottomlessness of a pond without taking the trouble to
sound it. I have visited two such Bottomless Ponds in one walk in this
neighborhood. Many have believed that Walden reached quite through to
the other side of the globe. Some who have lain flat on the ice for a
long time, looking down through the illusive medium, perchance with
watery eyes into the bargain, and driven to hasty conclusions by the
fear of catching cold in their breasts, have seen vast holes “into
which a load of hay might be driven,” if there were any body to drive
it, the undoubted source of the Styx and entrance to the Infernal
Regions from these parts. Others have gone down from the village with a
“fifty-six” and a wagon load of inch rope, but yet have failed to find
any bottom; for while the “fifty-six” was resting by the way, they were
paying out the rope in the vain attempt to fathom their truly
immeasurable capacity for marvellousness. But I can assure my readers
that Walden has a reasonably tight bottom at a not unreasonable, though
at an unusual, depth. I fathomed it easily with a cod-line and a stone
weighing about a pound and a half, and could tell accurately when the
stone left the bottom, by having to pull so much harder before the
water got underneath to help me. The greatest depth was exactly one
hundred and two feet; to which may be added the five feet which it has
risen since, making one hundred and seven. This is a remarkable depth
for so small 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 of men? 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
be bottomless.

A factory owner, hearing what depth I had found, thought that it could
not be true, for, judging from his acquaintance with dams, sand would
not lie at so steep an angle. But the deepest ponds are not so deep in
proportion to their area as most suppose, and, if drained, would not
leave very remarkable valleys. They are not like cups between the
hills; for this one, which is so unusually deep for its area, appears
in a vertical section through its centre not deeper than a shallow
plate. Most ponds, emptied, would leave a meadow no more hollow than we
frequently see. William Gilpin, who is so admirable in all that relates
to landscapes, and usually so correct, standing at the head of Loch
Fyne, in Scotland, which he describes as “a bay of salt water, sixty or
seventy fathoms deep, four miles in breadth,” and about fifty miles
long, surrounded by mountains, observes, “If we could have seen it
immediately after the diluvian crash, or whatever convulsion of Nature
occasioned it, before the waters 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 these
proportions to Walden, which, as we have seen, appears already in a
vertical section only like a shallow plate, it will appear four times
as shallow. So much for the _increased_ horrors of the chasm of Loch
Fyne when emptied. No doubt many a smiling valley with its stretching
cornfields occupies exactly such a “horrid chasm,” from which the
waters have receded, though it requires the insight and the far sight
of the geologist to convince the unsuspecting inhabitants of this fact.
Often an inquisitive eye may detect the shores of a primitive lake in
the low horizon hills, and no subsequent elevation of the plain has
been necessary to conceal their history. But it is easiest, as they who
work on the highways know, to find the hollows by the puddles after a
shower. The amount of it is, the imagination give it the least license,
dives deeper and soars higher than Nature goes. So, probably, the depth
of the ocean will be found to be very inconsiderable compared with its
breadth.

As I sounded through the ice I could determine the shape of the bottom
with greater accuracy than is possible in surveying harbors which do
not freeze over, and I was surprised at its general regularity. In the
deepest part there are several acres more level than almost any field
which is exposed to the sun wind and plough. In one instance, on a line
arbitrarily chosen, the depth did not vary more than one foot in thirty
rods; and generally, near the middle, I could calculate the variation
for each one hundred feet in any direction beforehand within three or
four inches. Some are accustomed to speak of deep and dangerous holes
even in quiet sandy ponds like this, but the effect of water under
these circumstances is to level all inequalities. The regularity of the
bottom and its conformity to the shores and the range of the
neighboring hills were so perfect that a distant promontory betrayed
itself in the soundings quite across the pond, and its direction could
be determined by 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 observed this
remarkable coincidence. Having noticed that the number indicating the
greatest depth was apparently in the centre of the map, I laid a rule
on the map lengthwise, and then breadthwise, and found, to my surprise,
that the line of greatest length intersected the line of greatest
breadth _exactly_ at the point of greatest depth, notwithstanding that
the middle is so nearly level, the outline of the pond far from
regular, and the extreme length and breadth were got by measuring into
the coves; and I said to myself, Who knows but this hint would conduct
to the deepest part of the ocean as well as of a pond or puddle? Is not
this the rule also for the height of mountains, regarded as the
opposite of valleys? We know that a hill is not highest at its
narrowest part.

Of five coves, three, or all which had been sounded, were observed to
have a bar quite across their mouths and deeper water within, so that
the bay tended to be an expansion of water within the land not only
horizontally but vertically, and to form a basin or independent pond,
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. In
proportion as the mouth of the cove was wider compared with its length,
the water over the bar was deeper compared with that in the basin.
Given, then, the length and breadth of the cove, and the character of
the surrounding shore, and you have almost elements enough to make out
a formula for all cases.

In order to see how nearly I could guess, with this experience, at the
deepest point in a pond, by observing the outlines of its surface and
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 in it,
nor any visible inlet or outlet; and as the line of greatest breadth
fell very near the line of least breadth, where two opposite capes
approached each other and two opposite bays receded, I ventured to mark
a point a short distance from the latter line, but still on the line of
greatest length, as the deepest. The deepest part was found to be
within one hundred feet of this, still farther in the direction to
which I had inclined, and was only one foot deeper, namely, sixty feet.
Of course, a stream running through, or an island 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 the particular
results at that point. Now we know only a few laws, and our result is
vitiated, not, of course, by any confusion or irregularity in Nature,
but by our ignorance of essential elements in the calculation. Our
notions of law and harmony are commonly confined to those instances
which we detect; but the harmony which results from a far greater
number of seemingly conflicting, but really concurring, laws, which we
have not detected, is still more wonderful. The particular laws are as
our points of view, as, to the traveller, a mountain outline varies
with every step, and it has an infinite number of profiles, though
absolutely but one form. Even when cleft or bored through it is not
comprehended in its entireness.

What I have observed of the pond is no less true in ethics. It is the
law of average. Such a rule of the two diameters not only guides us
toward the sun in the system and the heart in man, but draw lines
through the length and breadth of the aggregate of a man’s particular
daily behaviors and waves of life into his coves and inlets, and where
they intersect will be the height or depth of his character. Perhaps we
need only to know how his shores trend and his adjacent country or
circumstances, to infer his depth and concealed bottom. If he is
surrounded by mountainous circumstances, an Achillean shore, whose
peaks overshadow and are reflected in his bosom, they suggest a
corresponding depth in him. But a low and smooth shore proves him
shallow on that side. In our bodies, a bold projecting brow falls off
to and indicates a corresponding depth of thought. Also there is a bar
across the entrance of our every cove, or particular inclination; each
is our harbor for a season, in which we are detained and partially
land-locked. These inclinations are not whimsical usually, but their
form, size, and direction are determined by the promontories of the
shore, the ancient axes of elevation. When this bar is gradually
increased by storms, tides, or currents, or there is a subsidence of
the waters, so that it reaches to the surface, that which was at first
but an inclination in the shore in which a thought was harbored becomes
an individual lake, cut off from the ocean, wherein the thought secures
its own conditions, changes, perhaps, from salt to fresh, becomes a
sweet sea, dead sea, or a marsh. At the advent of each individual into
this life, may we not suppose that such a bar has risen to the surface
somewhere? It is true, we are such poor navigators that our thoughts,
for the most part, stand off and on upon a harborless coast, are
conversant only with the bights of the bays of poesy, or steer for the
public ports of entry, and go into the dry docks of science, where they
merely refit for this world, and no natural currents concur to
individualize them.

As for the inlet or outlet of Walden, I have not discovered any but
rain and snow and evaporation, though perhaps, with a thermometer and a
line, such places may be found, for where the water flows into the pond
it will probably be coldest in summer and warmest in winter. When the
ice-men were at work here in ’46–7, the cakes sent to the shore were
one day rejected by those who were stacking them up there, not being
thick enough to lie side by side with the rest; and the cutters thus
discovered that the ice over a small space was two or three inches
thinner than elsewhere, which made them think that there was an inlet
there. They also showed me in another place what they thought was a
“leach hole,” through which the pond leaked out under a hill into a
neighboring meadow, pushing me out on a cake of ice to see it. It was a
small cavity under ten feet of water; but I think that I can warrant
the pond not to need soldering till they find a worse leak than that.
One has suggested, that if such a “leach hole” should be found, its
connection with the meadow, if any existed, might be proved by
conveying some colored powder or sawdust to the mouth of the hole, and
then putting a strainer over the spring in the meadow, which would
catch some of the 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 a level
cannot be used on ice. At one rod from the shore its greatest
fluctuation, when observed by means of a level on land directed toward
a graduated staff on the ice, was three quarters of an inch, though the
ice appeared firmly attached to the shore. It was probably greater in
the middle. Who knows but if our instruments were delicate enough we
might detect an undulation in the crust of the earth? When two legs of
my level were on the shore and the third on the ice, and the sights
were directed over the latter, a rise or fall of the ice of an almost
infinitesimal amount made a difference of several feet on a tree across
the pond. When I began to cut holes for sounding, there were three or
four inches of water on the ice under a deep snow which had sunk it