Sounds
But while we are confined to books, though the most select and classic,
and read only particular written languages, which are themselves but
dialects and provincial, we are in danger of forgetting the language
which all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is
copious and standard. Much is published, but little printed. The rays
which stream through the shutter will be no longer remembered when the
shutter is wholly removed. No method nor discipline can supersede the
necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history or
philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society,
or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of
looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student
merely, or a seer? Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on
into futurity.
I did not read books the first summer; I hoed beans. Nay, I often did
better than this. There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice
the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or
hands. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning,
having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise
till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs,
in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sing around or
flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at
my west window, or the noise of some traveller's wagon on the distant
highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons
like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the
hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but
so much over and above my usual allowance. I realized what the Orientals
mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works. For the most part, I
minded not how the hours went. The day advanced as if to light some
work of mine; it was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing
memorable is accomplished. Instead of singing like the birds, I silently
smiled at my incessant good fortune. As the sparrow had its trill,
sitting on the hickory before my door, so had I my chuckle or suppressed
warble which he might hear out of my nest. My days were not days of the
week, bearing the stamp of any heathen deity, nor were they minced into
hours and fretted by the ticking of a clock; for I lived like the Puri
Indians, of whom it is said that "for yesterday, today, and tomorrow
they have only one word, and they express the variety of meaning by
pointing backward for yesterday forward for tomorrow, and overhead for
the passing day." This was sheer idleness to my fellow-townsmen, no
doubt; but if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I
should not have been found wanting. A man must find his occasions in
himself, it is true. The natural day is very calm, and will hardly
reprove his indolence.
I had this advantage, at least, in my mode of life, over those who were
obliged to look abroad for amusement, to society and the theatre, that
my life itself was become my amusement and never ceased to be novel.
It was a drama of many scenes and without an end. If we were always,
indeed, getting our living, and regulating our lives according to the
last and best mode we had learned, we should never be troubled with
ennui. Follow your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show
you a fresh prospect every hour. Housework was a pleasant pastime. When
my floor was dirty, I rose early, and, setting all my furniture out of
doors on the grass, bed and bedstead making but one budget, dashed water
on the floor, and sprinkled white sand from the pond on it, and then
with a broom scrubbed it clean and white; and by the time the villagers
had broken their fast the morning sun had dried my house sufficiently to
allow me to move in again, and my meditations were almost uninterupted.
It was pleasant to see my whole household effects out on the grass,
making a little pile like a gypsy's pack, and my three-legged table,
from which I did not remove the books and pen and ink, standing amid the
pines and hickories. They seemed glad to get out themselves, and as if
unwilling to be brought in. I was sometimes tempted to stretch an awning
over them and take my seat there. It was worth the while to see the sun
shine on these things, and hear the free wind blow on them; so much more
interesting most familiar objects look out of doors than in the house. A
bird sits on the next bough, life-everlasting grows under the table,
and blackberry vines run round its legs; pine cones, chestnut burs, and
strawberry leaves are strewn about. It looked as if this was the way
these forms came to be transferred to our furniture, to tables, chairs,
and bedsteads--because they once stood in their midst.
My house was on the side of a hill, immediately on the edge of
the larger wood, in the midst of a young forest of pitch pines and
hickories, and half a dozen rods from the pond, to which a narrow
footpath led down the hill. In my front yard grew the strawberry,
blackberry, and life-everlasting, johnswort and goldenrod, shrub oaks
and sand cherry, blueberry and groundnut. Near the end of May, the sand
cherry (Cerasus pumila) adorned the sides of the path with its delicate
flowers arranged in umbels cylindrically about its short stems, which
last, in the fall, weighed down with good-sized and handsome cherries,
fell over in wreaths like rays on every side. I tasted them out of
compliment to Nature, though they were scarcely palatable. The sumach
(Rhus glabra) grew luxuriantly about the house, pushing up through the
embankment which I had made, and growing five or six feet the first
season. Its broad pinnate tropical leaf was pleasant though strange to
look on. The large buds, suddenly pushing out late in the spring from
dry sticks which had seemed to be dead, developed themselves as by
magic into graceful green and tender boughs, an inch in diameter; and
sometimes, as I sat at my window, so heedlessly did they grow and tax
their weak joints, I heard a fresh and tender bough suddenly fall like
a fan to the ground, when there was not a breath of air stirring, broken
off by its own weight. In August, the large masses of berries, which,
when in flower, had attracted many wild bees, gradually assumed their
bright velvety crimson hue, and by their weight again bent down and
broke the tender limbs.
*****
As I sit at my window this summer afternoon, hawks are circling about my
clearing; the tantivy of wild pigeons, flying by two and threes athwart
my view, or perching restless on the white pine boughs behind my house,
gives a voice to the air; a fish hawk dimples the glassy surface of the
pond and brings up a fish; a mink steals out of the marsh before my door
and seizes a frog by the shore; the sedge is bending under the weight of
the reed-birds flitting hither and thither; and for the last half-hour I
have heard the rattle of railroad cars, now dying away and then reviving
like the beat of a partridge, conveying travellers from Boston to the
country. For I did not live so out of the world as that boy who, as I
hear, was put out to a farmer in the east part of the town, but ere long
ran away and came home again, quite down at the heel and homesick. He
had never seen such a dull and out-of-the-way place; the folks were all
gone off; why, you couldn't even hear the whistle! I doubt if there is
such a place in Massachusetts now:--
"In truth, our village has become a butt
For one of those fleet railroad shafts, and
o'er
Our peaceful plain its soothing sound is--Concord."
The Fitchburg Railroad touches the pond about a hundred rods south of
where I dwell. I usually go to the village along its causeway, and am,
as it were, related to society by this link. The men on the freight
trains, who go over the whole length of the road, bow to me as to an old
acquaintance, they pass me so often, and apparently they take me for an
employee; and so I am. I too would fain be a track-repairer somewhere in
the orbit of the earth.
The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods summer and winter,
sounding like the scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer's yard,
informing me that many restless city merchants are arriving within the
circle of the town, or adventurous country traders from the other side.
As they come under one horizon, they shout their warning to get off the
track to the other, heard sometimes through the circles of two towns.
Here come your groceries, country; your rations, countrymen! Nor is
there any man so independent on his farm that he can say them nay. And
here's your pay for them! screams the countryman's whistle; timber like
long battering-rams going twenty miles an hour against the city's walls,
and chairs enough to seat all the weary and heavy-laden that dwell
within them. With such huge and lumbering civility the country hands a
chair to the city. All the Indian huckleberry hills are stripped, all
the cranberry meadows are raked into the city. Up comes the cotton, down
goes the woven cloth; up comes the silk, down goes the woollen; up come
the books, but down goes the wit that writes them.
When I meet the engine with its train of cars moving off with planetary
motion--or, rather, like a comet, for the beholder knows not if with
that velocity and with that direction it will ever revisit this system,
since its orbit does not look like a returning curve--with its steam
cloud like a banner streaming behind in golden and silver wreaths, like
many a downy cloud which I have seen, high in the heavens, unfolding its
masses to the light--as if this traveling demigod, this cloud-compeller,
would ere long take the sunset sky for the livery of his train; when
I hear the iron horse make the hills echo with his snort like thunder,
shaking the earth with his feet, and breathing fire and smoke from his
nostrils (what kind of winged horse or fiery dragon they will put into
the new Mythology I don't know), it seems as if the earth had got a
race now worthy to inhabit it. If all were as it seems, and men made the
elements their servants for noble ends! If the cloud that hangs over the
engine were the perspiration of heroic deeds, or as beneficent as that
which floats over the farmer's fields, then the elements and Nature
herself would cheerfully accompany men on their errands and be their
escort.
I watch the passage of the morning cars with the same feeling that I
do the rising of the sun, which is hardly more regular. Their train
of clouds stretching far behind and rising higher and higher, going to
heaven while the cars are going to Boston, conceals the sun for a minute
and casts my distant field into the shade, a celestial train beside
which the petty train of cars which hugs the earth is but the barb
of the spear. The stabler of the iron horse was up early this winter
morning by the light of the stars amid the mountains, to fodder and
harness his steed. Fire, too, was awakened thus early to put the vital
heat in him and get him off. If the enterprise were as innocent as it is
early! If the snow lies deep, they strap on his snowshoes, and, with the
giant plow, plow a furrow from the mountains to the seaboard, in which
the cars, like a following drill-barrow, sprinkle all the restless men
and floating merchandise in the country for seed. All day the fire-steed
flies over the country, stopping only that his master may rest, and I am
awakened by his tramp and defiant snort at midnight, when in some remote
glen in the woods he fronts the elements incased in ice and snow; and he
will reach his stall only with the morning star, to start once more on
his travels without rest or slumber. Or perchance, at evening, I hear
him in his stable blowing off the superfluous energy of the day, that he
may calm his nerves and cool his liver and brain for a few hours of
iron slumber. If the enterprise were as heroic and commanding as it is
protracted and unwearied!
Far through unfrequented woods on the confines of towns, where once only
the hunter penetrated by day, in the darkest night dart these bright
saloons without the knowledge of their inhabitants; this moment stopping
at some brilliant station-house in town or city, where a social crowd
is gathered, the next in the Dismal Swamp, scaring the owl and fox. The
startings and arrivals of the cars are now the epochs in the village
day. They go and come with such regularity and precision, and their
whistle can be heard so far, that the farmers set their clocks by them,
and thus one well-conducted institution regulates a whole country.
Have not men improved somewhat in punctuality since the railroad was
invented? Do they not talk and think faster in the depot than they did
in the stage-office? There is something electrifying in the atmosphere
of the former place. I have been astonished at the miracles it has
wrought; that some of my neighbors, who, I should have prophesied, once
for all, would never get to Boston by so prompt a conveyance, are on
hand when the bell rings. To do things "railroad fashion" is now the
byword; and it is worth the while to be warned so often and so sincerely
by any power to get off its track. There is no stopping to read the
riot act, no firing over the heads of the mob, in this case. We have
constructed a fate, an Atropos, that never turns aside. (Let that be
the name of your engine.) Men are advertised that at a certain hour and
minute these bolts will be shot toward particular points of the compass;
yet it interferes with no man's business, and the children go to school
on the other track. We live the steadier for it. We are all educated
thus to be sons of Tell. The air is full of invisible bolts. Every path
but your own is the path of fate. Keep on your own track, then.
What recommends commerce to me is its enterprise and bravery. It does
not clasp its hands and pray to Jupiter. I see these men every day go
about their business with more or less courage and content, doing more
even than they suspect, and perchance better employed than they could
have consciously devised. I am less affected by their heroism who stood
up for half an hour in the front line at Buena Vista, than by the steady
and cheerful valor of the men who inhabit the snowplow for their winter
quarters; who have not merely the three-o'-clock-in-the-morning courage,
which Bonaparte thought was the rarest, but whose courage does not go to
rest so early, who go to sleep only when the storm sleeps or the sinews
of their iron steed are frozen. On this morning of the Great Snow,
perchance, which is still raging and chilling men's blood, I bear the
muffled tone of their engine bell from out the fog bank of their chilled
breath, which announces that the cars are coming, without long delay,
notwithstanding the veto of a New England northeast snow-storm, and
I behold the plowmen covered with snow and rime, their heads peering,
above the mould-board which is turning down other than daisies and the
nests of field mice, like bowlders of the Sierra Nevada, that occupy an
outside place in the universe.
Commerce is unexpectedly confident and serene, alert, adventurous, and
unwearied. It is very natural in its methods withal, far more so than
many fantastic enterprises and sentimental experiments, and hence its
singular success. I am refreshed and expanded when the freight train
rattles past me, and I smell the stores which go dispensing their odors
all the way from Long Wharf to Lake Champlain, reminding me of foreign
parts, of coral reefs, and Indian oceans, and tropical climes, and the
extent of the globe. I feel more like a citizen of the world at the
sight of the palm-leaf which will cover so many flaxen New England heads
the next summer, the Manilla hemp and cocoanut husks, the old junk,
gunny bags, scrap iron, and rusty nails. This carload of torn sails is
more legible and interesting now than if they should be wrought into
paper and printed books. Who can write so graphically the history of
the storms they have weathered as these rents have done? They are
proof-sheets which need no correction. Here goes lumber from the Maine
woods, which did not go out to sea in the last freshet, risen four
dollars on the thousand because of what did go out or was split up;
pine, spruce, cedar--first, second, third, and fourth qualities,
so lately all of one quality, to wave over the bear, and moose, and
caribou. Next rolls Thomaston lime, a prime lot, which will get far
among the hills before it gets slacked. These rags in bales, of all hues
and qualities, the lowest condition to which cotton and linen descend,
the final result of dress--of patterns which are now no longer cried up,
unless it be in Milwaukee, as those splendid articles, English, French,
or American prints, ginghams, muslins, etc., gathered from all quarters
both of fashion and poverty, going to become paper of one color or a
few shades only, on which, forsooth, will be written tales of real life,
high and low, and founded on fact! This closed car smells of salt fish,
the strong New England and commercial scent, reminding me of the Grand
Banks and the fisheries. Who has not seen a salt fish, thoroughly
cured for this world, so that nothing can spoil it, and putting the
perseverance of the saints to the blush? with which you may sweep or
pave the streets, and split your kindlings, and the teamster shelter
himself and his lading against sun, wind, and rain behind it--and the
trader, as a Concord trader once did, hang it up by his door for a sign
when he commences business, until at last his oldest customer cannot
tell surely whether it be animal, vegetable, or mineral, and yet it
shall be as pure as a snowflake, and if it be put into a pot and boiled,
will come out an excellent dun-fish for a Saturday's dinner. Next
Spanish hides, with the tails still preserving their twist and the angle
of elevation they had when the oxen that wore them were careering over
the pampas of the Spanish Main--a type of all obstinacy, and evincing
how almost hopeless and incurable are all constitutional vices. I
confess, that practically speaking, when I have learned a man's real
disposition, I have no hopes of changing it for the better or worse
in this state of existence. As the Orientals say, "A cur's tail may be
warmed, and pressed, and bound round with ligatures, and after a twelve
years' labor bestowed upon it, still it will retain its natural form."
The only effectual cure for such inveteracies as these tails exhibit is
to make glue of them, which I believe is what is usually done with them,
and then they will stay put and stick. Here is a hogshead of molasses
or of brandy directed to John Smith, Cuttingsville, Vermont, some
trader among the Green Mountains, who imports for the farmers near his
clearing, and now perchance stands over his bulkhead and thinks of
the last arrivals on the coast, how they may affect the price for him,
telling his customers this moment, as he has told them twenty times
before this morning, that he expects some by the next train of prime
quality. It is advertised in the Cuttingsville Times.
While these things go up other things come down. Warned by the whizzing
sound, I look up from my book and see some tall pine, hewn on far
northern hills, which has winged its way over the Green Mountains and
the Connecticut, shot like an arrow through the township within ten
minutes, and scarce another eye beholds it; going
"to be the mast
Of some great ammiral."
And hark! here comes the cattle-train bearing the cattle of a thousand
hills, sheepcots, stables, and cow-yards in the air, drovers with their
sticks, and shepherd boys in the midst of their flocks, all but the
mountain pastures, whirled along like leaves blown from the mountains by
the September gales. The air is filled with the bleating of calves and
sheep, and the hustling of oxen, as if a pastoral valley were going by.
When the old bell-wether at the head rattles his bell, the mountains
do indeed skip like rams and the little hills like lambs. A carload
of drovers, too, in the midst, on a level with their droves now, their
vocation gone, but still clinging to their useless sticks as their badge
of office. But their dogs, where are they? It is a stampede to them;
they are quite thrown out; they have lost the scent. Methinks I hear
them barking behind the Peterboro' Hills, or panting up the western
slope of the Green Mountains. They will not be in at the death. Their
vocation, too, is gone. Their fidelity and sagacity are below par now.
They will slink back to their kennels in disgrace, or perchance run wild
and strike a league with the wolf and the fox. So is your pastoral life
whirled past and away. But the bell rings, and I must get off the track
and let the cars go by;--
What's the railroad to me?
I never go to see
Where it ends.
It fills a few
hollows,
And makes banks for the swallows,
It sets the sand a-blowing,
And the
blackberries a-growing,
but I cross it like a cart-path in the woods. I will not have my eyes
put out and my ears spoiled by its smoke and steam and hissing.
*****
Now that the cars are gone by and all the restless world with them, and
the fishes in the pond no longer feel their rumbling, I am more alone
than ever. For the rest of the long afternoon, perhaps, my meditations
are interrupted only by the faint rattle of a carriage or team along the
distant highway.
Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the Lincoln, Acton, Bedford,
or Concord bell, when the wind was favorable, a faint, sweet, and, as
it were, natural melody, worth importing into the wilderness. At
a sufficient distance over the woods this sound acquires a certain
vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the horizon were the strings of
a harp which it swept. All sound heard at the greatest possible distance
produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre,
just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth
interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it. There came
to me in this case a melody which the air had strained, and which had
conversed with every leaf and needle of the wood, that portion of the
sound which the elements had taken up and modulated and echoed from vale
to vale. The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein
is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of what was
worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood; the same
trivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph.
At evening, the distant lowing of some cow in the horizon beyond the
woods sounded sweet and melodious, and at first I would mistake it for
the voices of certain minstrels by whom I was sometimes serenaded, who
might be straying over hill and dale; but soon I was not unpleasantly
disappointed when it was prolonged into the cheap and natural music of
the cow. I do not mean to be satirical, but to express my appreciation
of those youths' singing, when I state that I perceived clearly that
it was akin to the music of the cow, and they were at length one
articulation of Nature.
Regularly at half-past seven, in one part of the summer, after the
evening train had gone by, the whip-poor-wills chanted their vespers for
half an hour, sitting on a stump by my door, or upon the ridge-pole of
the house. They would begin to sing almost with as much precision as a
clock, within five minutes of a particular time, referred to the setting
of the sun, every evening. I had a rare opportunity to become acquainted
with their habits. Sometimes I heard four or five at once in different
parts of the wood, by accident one a bar behind another, and so near me
that I distinguished not only the cluck after each note, but often that
singular buzzing sound like a fly in a spider's web, only proportionally
louder. Sometimes one would circle round and round me in the woods a few
feet distant as if tethered by a string, when probably I was near its
eggs. They sang at intervals throughout the night, and were again as
musical as ever just before and about dawn.
When other birds are still, the screech owls take up the strain, like
mourning women their ancient u-lu-lu. Their dismal scream is truly Ben
Jonsonian. Wise midnight hags! It is no honest and blunt tu-whit tu-who
of the poets, but, without jesting, a most solemn graveyard ditty, the
mutual consolations of suicide lovers remembering the pangs and the
delights of supernal love in the infernal groves. Yet I love to hear
their wailing, their doleful responses, trilled along the woodside;
reminding me sometimes of music and singing birds; as if it were the
dark and tearful side of music, the regrets and sighs that would fain be
sung. They are the spirits, the low spirits and melancholy forebodings,
of fallen souls that once in human shape night-walked the earth and did
the deeds of darkness, now expiating their sins with their wailing hymns
or threnodies in the scenery of their transgressions. They give me a
new sense of the variety and capacity of that nature which is our common
dwelling. Oh-o-o-o-o that I never had been bor-r-r-r-n! sighs one on
this side of the pond, and circles with the restlessness of despair
to some new perch on the gray oaks. Then--that I never had been
bor-r-r-r-n! echoes another on the farther side with tremulous
sincerity, and--bor-r-r-r-n! comes faintly from far in the Lincoln
woods.
I was also serenaded by a hooting owl. Near at hand you could fancy
it the most melancholy sound in Nature, as if she meant by this to
stereotype and make permanent in her choir the dying moans of a human
being--some poor weak relic of mortality who has left hope behind, and
howls like an animal, yet with human sobs, on entering the dark valley,
made more awful by a certain gurgling melodiousness--I find myself
beginning with the letters gl when I try to imitate it--expressive of
a mind which has reached the gelatinous, mildewy stage in the
mortification of all healthy and courageous thought. It reminded me
of ghouls and idiots and insane howlings. But now one answers from far
woods in a strain made really melodious by distance--Hoo hoo hoo,
hoorer hoo; and indeed for the most part it suggested only pleasing
associations, whether heard by day or night, summer or winter.
I rejoice that there are owls. Let them do the idiotic and maniacal
hooting for men. It is a sound admirably suited to swamps and twilight
woods which no day illustrates, suggesting a vast and undeveloped nature
which men have not recognized. They represent the stark twilight and
unsatisfied thoughts which all have. All day the sun has shone on the
surface of some savage swamp, where the single spruce stands hung with
usnea lichens, and small hawks circulate above, and the chickadee lisps
amid the evergreens, and the partridge and rabbit skulk beneath; but now
a more dismal and fitting day dawns, and a different race of creatures
awakes to express the meaning of Nature there.
Late in the evening I heard the distant rumbling of wagons over
bridges--a sound heard farther than almost any other at night--the
baying of dogs, and sometimes again the lowing of some disconsolate cow
in a distant barn-yard. In the mean-while all the shore rang with the
trump of bullfrogs, the sturdy spirits of ancient wine-bibbers and
wassailers, still unrepentant, trying to sing a catch in their Stygian
lake--if the Walden nymphs will pardon the comparison, for though there
are almost no weeds, there are frogs there--who would fain keep up the
hilarious rules of their old festal tables, though their voices have
waxed hoarse and solemnly grave, mocking at mirth, and the wine has lost
its flavor, and become only liquor to distend their paunches, and sweet
intoxication never comes to drown the memory of the past, but mere
saturation and waterloggedness and distention. The most aldermanic, with
his chin upon a heart-leaf, which serves for a napkin to his drooling
chaps, under this northern shore quaffs a deep draught of the
once scorned water, and passes round the cup with the ejaculation
tr-r-r-oonk, tr-r-r--oonk, tr-r-r-oonk! and straightway comes over the
water from some distant cove the same password repeated, where the
next in seniority and girth has gulped down to his mark; and when this
observance has made the circuit of the shores, then ejaculates the
master of ceremonies, with satisfaction, tr-r-r-oonk! and each in
his turn repeats the same down to the least distended, leakiest, and
flabbiest paunched, that there be no mistake; and then the howl goes
round again and again, until the sun disperses the morning mist, and
only the patriarch is not under the pond, but vainly bellowing _troonk_
from time to time, and pausing for a reply.
I am not sure that I ever heard the sound of cock-crowing from my
clearing, and I thought that it might be worth the while to keep a
cockerel for his music merely, as a singing bird. The note of this once
wild Indian pheasant is certainly the most remarkable of any bird's, and
if they could be naturalized without being domesticated, it would soon
become the most famous sound in our woods, surpassing the clangor of the
goose and the hooting of the owl; and then imagine the cackling of the
hens to fill the pauses when their lords' clarions rested! No wonder
that man added this bird to his tame stock--to say nothing of the eggs
and drumsticks. To walk in a winter morning in a wood where these birds
abounded, their native woods, and hear the wild cockerels crow on the
trees, clear and shrill for miles over the resounding earth, drowning
the feebler notes of other birds--think of it! It would put nations on
the alert. Who would not be early to rise, and rise earlier and earlier
every successive day of his life, till he became unspeakably healthy,
wealthy, and wise? This foreign bird's note is celebrated by the poets
of all countries along with the notes of their native songsters. All
climates agree with brave Chanticleer. He is more indigenous even than
the natives. His health is ever good, his lungs are sound, his spirits
never flag. Even the sailor on the Atlantic and Pacific is awakened by
his voice; but its shrill sound never roused me from my slumbers. I kept
neither dog, cat, cow, pig, nor hens, so that you would have said
there was a deficiency of domestic sounds; neither the churn, nor the
spinning-wheel, nor even the singing of the kettle, nor the hissing of
the urn, nor children crying, to comfort one. An old-fashioned man would
have lost his senses or died of ennui before this. Not even rats in the
wall, for they were starved out, or rather were never baited in--only
squirrels on the roof and under the floor, a whip-poor-will on the
ridge-pole, a blue jay screaming beneath the window, a hare or woodchuck
under the house, a screech owl or a cat owl behind it, a flock of wild
geese or a laughing loon on the pond, and a fox to bark in the night.
Not even a lark or an oriole, those mild plantation birds, ever visited
my clearing. No cockerels to crow nor hens to cackle in the yard. No
yard! but unfenced nature reaching up to your very sills. A young forest
growing up under your meadows, and wild sumachs and blackberry vines
breaking through into your cellar; sturdy pitch pines rubbing and
creaking against the shingles for want of room, their roots reaching
quite under the house. Instead of a scuttle or a blind blown off in the
gale--a pine tree snapped off or torn up by the roots behind your
house for fuel. Instead of no path to the front-yard gate in the Great
Snow--no gate--no front-yard--and no path to the civilized world.
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