Visitors
I think that I love society as much as most, and am ready enough to
fasten myself like a bloodsucker for the time to any full-blooded man
that comes in my way. I am naturally no hermit, but might possibly sit
out the sturdiest frequenter of the bar-room, if my business called me
thither.
I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship,
three for society. When visitors came in larger and unexpected
numbers there was but the third chair for them all, but they generally
economized the room by standing up. It is surprising how many great men
and women a small house will contain. I have had twenty-five or thirty
souls, with their bodies, at once under my roof, and yet we often parted
without being aware that we had come very near to one another. Many
of our houses, both public and private, with their almost innumerable
apartments, their huge halls and their cellars for the storage of wines
and other munitions of peace, appear to be extravagantly large for their
inhabitants. They are so vast and magnificent that the latter seem to be
only vermin which infest them. I am surprised when the herald blows his
summons before some Tremont or Astor or Middlesex House, to see come
creeping out over the piazza for all inhabitants a ridiculous mouse,
which soon again slinks into some hole in the pavement.
One inconvenience I sometimes experienced in so small a house, the
difficulty of getting to a sufficient distance from my guest when we
began to utter the big thoughts in big words. You want room for your
thoughts to get into sailing trim and run a course or two before they
make their port. The bullet of your thought must have overcome its
lateral and ricochet motion and fallen into its last and steady course
before it reaches the ear of the hearer, else it may plow out again
through the side of his head. Also, our sentences wanted room to unfold
and form their columns in the interval. Individuals, like nations, must
have suitable broad and natural boundaries, even a considerable neutral
ground, between them. I have found it a singular luxury to talk across
the pond to a companion on the opposite side. In my house we were so
near that we could not begin to hear--we could not speak low enough to
be heard; as when you throw two stones into calm water so near that they
break each other's undulations. If we are merely loquacious and loud
talkers, then we can afford to stand very near together, cheek by
jowl, and feel each other's breath; but if we speak reservedly and
thoughtfully, we want to be farther apart, that all animal heat and
moisture may have a chance to evaporate. If we would enjoy the most
intimate society with that in each of us which is without, or above,
being spoken to, we must not only be silent, but commonly so far apart
bodily that we cannot possibly hear each other's voice in any case.
Referred to this standard, speech is for the convenience of those who
are hard of hearing; but there are many fine things which we cannot say
if we have to shout. As the conversation began to assume a loftier and
grander tone, we gradually shoved our chairs farther apart till they
touched the wall in opposite corners, and then commonly there was not
room enough.
My "best" room, however, my withdrawing room, always ready for company,
on whose carpet the sun rarely fell, was the pine wood behind my house.
Thither in summer days, when distinguished guests came, I took them, and
a priceless domestic swept the floor and dusted the furniture and kept
the things in order.
If one guest came he sometimes partook of my frugal meal, and it was no
interruption to conversation to be stirring a hasty-pudding, or
watching the rising and maturing of a loaf of bread in the ashes, in the
meanwhile. But if twenty came and sat in my house there was nothing said
about dinner, though there might be bread enough for two, more than if
eating were a forsaken habit; but we naturally practised abstinence; and
this was never felt to be an offence against hospitality, but the most
proper and considerate course. The waste and decay of physical life,
which so often needs repair, seemed miraculously retarded in such a
case, and the vital vigor stood its ground. I could entertain thus a
thousand as well as twenty; and if any ever went away disappointed or
hungry from my house when they found me at home, they may depend upon
it that I sympathized with them at least. So easy is it, though many
housekeepers doubt it, to establish new and better customs in the place
of the old. You need not rest your reputation on the dinners you give.
For my own part, I was never so effectually deterred from frequenting a
man's house, by any kind of Cerberus whatever, as by the parade one made
about dining me, which I took to be a very polite and roundabout hint
never to trouble him so again. I think I shall never revisit those
scenes. I should be proud to have for the motto of my cabin those lines
of Spenser which one of my visitors inscribed on a yellow walnut leaf
for a card:--
"Arrived there, the little house they fill,
Ne looke for entertainment
where none was;
Rest is their feast, and all things at their will:
The noblest mind the
best contentment has."
When Winslow, afterward governor of the Plymouth Colony, went with a
companion on a visit of ceremony to Massasoit on foot through the woods,
and arrived tired and hungry at his lodge, they were well received by
the king, but nothing was said about eating that day. When the night
arrived, to quote their own words--"He laid us on the bed with himself
and his wife, they at the one end and we at the other, it being only
planks laid a foot from the ground and a thin mat upon them. Two more of
his chief men, for want of room, pressed by and upon us; so that we were
worse weary of our lodging than of our journey." At one o'clock the next
day Massasoit "brought two fishes that he had shot," about thrice as big
as a bream. "These being boiled, there were at least forty looked for a
share in them; the most eat of them. This meal only we had in two nights
and a day; and had not one of us bought a partridge, we had taken our
journey fasting." Fearing that they would be light-headed for want of
food and also sleep, owing to "the savages' barbarous singing, (for they
use to sing themselves asleep,)" and that they might get home while they
had strength to travel, they departed. As for lodging, it is true they
were but poorly entertained, though what they found an inconvenience was
no doubt intended for an honor; but as far as eating was concerned, I do
not see how the Indians could have done better. They had nothing to
eat themselves, and they were wiser than to think that apologies could
supply the place of food to their guests; so they drew their belts
tighter and said nothing about it. Another time when Winslow visited
them, it being a season of plenty with them, there was no deficiency in
this respect.
As for men, they will hardly fail one anywhere. I had more visitors
while I lived in the woods than at any other period in my life; I mean
that I had some. I met several there under more favorable circumstances
than I could anywhere else. But fewer came to see me on trivial
business. In this respect, my company was winnowed by my mere distance
from town. I had withdrawn so far within the great ocean of solitude,
into which the rivers of society empty, that for the most part, so
far as my needs were concerned, only the finest sediment was deposited
around me. Beside, there were wafted to me evidences of unexplored and
uncultivated continents on the other side.
Who should come to my lodge this morning but a true Homeric or
Paphlagonian man--he had so suitable and poetic a name that I am sorry I
cannot print it here--a Canadian, a woodchopper and post-maker, who can
hole fifty posts in a day, who made his last supper on a woodchuck which
his dog caught. He, too, has heard of Homer, and, "if it were not for
books," would "not know what to do rainy days," though perhaps he has
not read one wholly through for many rainy seasons. Some priest who
could pronounce the Greek itself taught him to read his verse in the
Testament in his native parish far away; and now I must translate to
him, while he holds the book, Achilles' reproof to Patroclus for his sad
countenance.--"Why are you in tears, Patroclus, like a young girl?"--
"Or have you alone heard some news from Phthia?
They say that Menoetius lives yet, son
of Actor,
And Peleus lives, son of Æacus, among the Myrmidons,
Either of
whom having died, we should greatly grieve."
He says, "That's good." He has a great bundle of white oak bark under
his arm for a sick man, gathered this Sunday morning. "I suppose there's
no harm in going after such a thing to-day," says he. To him Homer was a
great writer, though what his writing was about he did not know. A more
simple and natural man it would be hard to find. Vice and disease, which
cast such a sombre moral hue over the world, seemed to have hardly any
existence for him. He was about twenty-eight years old, and had left
Canada and his father's house a dozen years before to work in the
States, and earn money to buy a farm with at last, perhaps in his native
country. He was cast in the coarsest mould; a stout but sluggish body,
yet gracefully carried, with a thick sunburnt neck, dark bushy hair, and
dull sleepy blue eyes, which were occasionally lit up with expression.
He wore a flat gray cloth cap, a dingy wool-colored greatcoat, and
cowhide boots. He was a great consumer of meat, usually carrying his
dinner to his work a couple of miles past my house--for he chopped all
summer--in a tin pail; cold meats, often cold woodchucks, and coffee in
a stone bottle which dangled by a string from his belt; and sometimes he
offered me a drink. He came along early, crossing my bean-field, though
without anxiety or haste to get to his work, such as Yankees exhibit.
He wasn't a-going to hurt himself. He didn't care if he only earned his
board. Frequently he would leave his dinner in the bushes, when his
dog had caught a woodchuck by the way, and go back a mile and a half to
dress it and leave it in the cellar of the house where he boarded, after
deliberating first for half an hour whether he could not sink it in the
pond safely till nightfall--loving to dwell long upon these themes. He
would say, as he went by in the morning, "How thick the pigeons are! If
working every day were not my trade, I could get all the meat I should
want by hunting-pigeons, woodchucks, rabbits, partridges--by gosh! I
could get all I should want for a week in one day."
He was a skilful chopper, and indulged in some flourishes and ornaments
in his art. He cut his trees level and close to the ground, that the
sprouts which came up afterward might be more vigorous and a sled might
slide over the stumps; and instead of leaving a whole tree to support
his corded wood, he would pare it away to a slender stake or splinter
which you could break off with your hand at last.
He interested me because he was so quiet and solitary and so happy
withal; a well of good humor and contentment which overflowed at his
eyes. His mirth was without alloy. Sometimes I saw him at his work
in the woods, felling trees, and he would greet me with a laugh of
inexpressible satisfaction, and a salutation in Canadian French, though
he spoke English as well. When I approached him he would suspend his
work, and with half-suppressed mirth lie along the trunk of a pine which
he had felled, and, peeling off the inner bark, roll it up into a ball
and chew it while he laughed and talked. Such an exuberance of animal
spirits had he that he sometimes tumbled down and rolled on the ground
with laughter at anything which made him think and tickled him. Looking
round upon the trees he would exclaim--"By George! I can enjoy myself
well enough here chopping; I want no better sport." Sometimes, when at
leisure, he amused himself all day in the woods with a pocket pistol,
firing salutes to himself at regular intervals as he walked. In the
winter he had a fire by which at noon he warmed his coffee in a kettle;
and as he sat on a log to eat his dinner the chickadees would sometimes
come round and alight on his arm and peck at the potato in his fingers;
and he said that he "liked to have the little fellers about him."
In him the animal man chiefly was developed. In physical endurance and
contentment he was cousin to the pine and the rock. I asked him once
if he was not sometimes tired at night, after working all day; and he
answered, with a sincere and serious look, "Gorrappit, I never was tired
in my life." But the intellectual and what is called spiritual man in
him were slumbering as in an infant. He had been instructed only in that
innocent and ineffectual way in which the Catholic priests teach the
aborigines, by which the pupil is never educated to the degree of
consciousness, but only to the degree of trust and reverence, and a
child is not made a man, but kept a child. When Nature made him, she
gave him a strong body and contentment for his portion, and propped him
on every side with reverence and reliance, that he might live out his
threescore years and ten a child. He was so genuine and unsophisticated
that no introduction would serve to introduce him, more than if you
introduced a woodchuck to your neighbor. He had got to find him out as
you did. He would not play any part. Men paid him wages for work, and
so helped to feed and clothe him; but he never exchanged opinions with
them. He was so simply and naturally humble--if he can be called humble
who never aspires--that humility was no distinct quality in him, nor
could he conceive of it. Wiser men were demigods to him. If you told
him that such a one was coming, he did as if he thought that anything so
grand would expect nothing of himself, but take all the responsibility
on itself, and let him be forgotten still. He never heard the sound of
praise. He particularly reverenced the writer and the preacher. Their
performances were miracles. When I told him that I wrote considerably,
he thought for a long time that it was merely the handwriting which I
meant, for he could write a remarkably good hand himself. I sometimes
found the name of his native parish handsomely written in the snow by
the highway, with the proper French accent, and knew that he had passed.
I asked him if he ever wished to write his thoughts. He said that he had
read and written letters for those who could not, but he never tried to
write thoughts--no, he could not, he could not tell what to put first,
it would kill him, and then there was spelling to be attended to at the
same time!
I heard that a distinguished wise man and reformer asked him if he did
not want the world to be changed; but he answered with a chuckle of
surprise in his Canadian accent, not knowing that the question had ever
been entertained before, "No, I like it well enough." It would have
suggested many things to a philosopher to have dealings with him. To
a stranger he appeared to know nothing of things in general; yet I
sometimes saw in him a man whom I had not seen before, and I did not
know whether he was as wise as Shakespeare or as simply ignorant as
a child, whether to suspect him of a fine poetic consciousness or of
stupidity. A townsman told me that when he met him sauntering through
the village in his small close-fitting cap, and whistling to himself, he
reminded him of a prince in disguise.
His only books were an almanac and an arithmetic, in which last he was
considerably expert. The former was a sort of cyclopaedia to him, which
he supposed to contain an abstract of human knowledge, as indeed it does
to a considerable extent. I loved to sound him on the various reforms
of the day, and he never failed to look at them in the most simple and
practical light. He had never heard of such things before. Could he do
without factories? I asked. He had worn the home-made Vermont gray, he
said, and that was good. Could he dispense with tea and coffee? Did this
country afford any beverage beside water? He had soaked hemlock leaves
in water and drank it, and thought that was better than water in warm
weather. When I asked him if he could do without money, he showed the
convenience of money in such a way as to suggest and coincide with the
most philosophical accounts of the origin of this institution, and the
very derivation of the word pecunia. If an ox were his property, and he
wished to get needles and thread at the store, he thought it would be
inconvenient and impossible soon to go on mortgaging some portion of
the creature each time to that amount. He could defend many institutions
better than any philosopher, because, in describing them as they
concerned him, he gave the true reason for their prevalence, and
speculation had not suggested to him any other. At another time, hearing
Plato's definition of a man--a biped without feathers--and that one
exhibited a cock plucked and called it Plato's man, he thought it
an important difference that the knees bent the wrong way. He would
sometimes exclaim, "How I love to talk! By George, I could talk all
day!" I asked him once, when I had not seen him for many months, if he
had got a new idea this summer. "Good Lord"--said he, "a man that has
to work as I do, if he does not forget the ideas he has had, he will do
well. May be the man you hoe with is inclined to race; then, by gorry,
your mind must be there; you think of weeds." He would sometimes ask me
first on such occasions, if I had made any improvement. One winter day I
asked him if he was always satisfied with himself, wishing to suggest a
substitute within him for the priest without, and some higher motive for
living. "Satisfied!" said he; "some men are satisfied with one thing,
and some with another. One man, perhaps, if he has got enough, will be
satisfied to sit all day with his back to the fire and his belly to the
table, by George!" Yet I never, by any manoeuvring, could get him to
take the spiritual view of things; the highest that he appeared to
conceive of was a simple expediency, such as you might expect an
animal to appreciate; and this, practically, is true of most men. If
I suggested any improvement in his mode of life, he merely answered,
without expressing any regret, that it was too late. Yet he thoroughly
believed in honesty and the like virtues.
There was a certain positive originality, however slight, to be detected
in him, and I occasionally observed that he was thinking for himself and
expressing his own opinion, a phenomenon so rare that I would any day
walk ten miles to observe it, and it amounted to the re-origination of
many of the institutions of society. Though he hesitated, and perhaps
failed to express himself distinctly, he always had a presentable
thought behind. Yet his thinking was so primitive and immersed in his
animal life, that, though more promising than a merely learned man's,
it rarely ripened to anything which can be reported. He suggested that
there might be men of genius in the lowest grades of life, however
permanently humble and illiterate, who take their own view always, or do
not pretend to see at all; who are as bottomless even as Walden Pond was
thought to be, though they may be dark and muddy.
Many a traveller came out of his way to see me and the inside of my
house, and, as an excuse for calling, asked for a glass of water. I told
them that I drank at the pond, and pointed thither, offering to lend
them a dipper. Far off as I lived, I was not exempted from the annual
visitation which occurs, methinks, about the first of April, when
everybody is on the move; and I had my share of good luck, though there
were some curious specimens among my visitors. Half-witted men from the
almshouse and elsewhere came to see me; but I endeavored to make them
exercise all the wit they had, and make their confessions to me; in such
cases making wit the theme of our conversation; and so was compensated.
Indeed, I found some of them to be wiser than the so-called _overseers_
of the poor and selectmen of the town, and thought it was time that the
tables were turned. With respect to wit, I learned that there was not
much difference between the half and the whole. One day, in particular,
an inoffensive, simple-minded pauper, whom with others I had often seen
used as fencing stuff, standing or sitting on a bushel in the fields to
keep cattle and himself from straying, visited me, and expressed a wish
to live as I did. He told me, with the utmost simplicity and truth,
quite superior, or rather inferior, to anything that is called humility,
that he was "deficient in intellect." These were his words. The Lord
had made him so, yet he supposed the Lord cared as much for him as for
another. "I have always been so," said he, "from my childhood; I never
had much mind; I was not like other children; I am weak in the head. It
was the Lord's will, I suppose." And there he was to prove the truth
of his words. He was a metaphysical puzzle to me. I have rarely met a
fellowman on such promising ground--it was so simple and sincere and so
true all that he said. And, true enough, in proportion as he appeared
to humble himself was he exalted. I did not know at first but it was the
result of a wise policy. It seemed that from such a basis of truth and
frankness as the poor weak-headed pauper had laid, our intercourse might
go forward to something better than the intercourse of sages.
I had some guests from those not reckoned commonly among the town's
poor, but who should be; who are among the world's poor, at any rate;
guests who appeal, not to your hospitality, but to your hospitalality;
who earnestly wish to be helped, and preface their appeal with the
information that they are resolved, for one thing, never to help
themselves. I require of a visitor that he be not actually starving,
though he may have the very best appetite in the world, however he got
it. Objects of charity are not guests. Men who did not know when their
visit had terminated, though I went about my business again, answering
them from greater and greater remoteness. Men of almost every degree of
wit called on me in the migrating season. Some who had more wits than
they knew what to do with; runaway slaves with plantation manners, who
listened from time to time, like the fox in the fable, as if they heard
the hounds a-baying on their track, and looked at me beseechingly, as
much as to say,--
"O Christian, will you send me back?
One real runaway slave, among the rest, whom I helped to forward toward
the north star. Men of one idea, like a hen with one chicken, and that
a duckling; men of a thousand ideas, and unkempt heads, like those hens
which are made to take charge of a hundred chickens, all in pursuit
of one bug, a score of them lost in every morning's dew--and become
frizzled and mangy in consequence; men of ideas instead of legs, a sort
of intellectual centipede that made you crawl all over. One man proposed
a book in which visitors should write their names, as at the White
Mountains; but, alas! I have too good a memory to make that necessary.
I could not but notice some of the peculiarities of my visitors. Girls
and boys and young women generally seemed glad to be in the woods. They
looked in the pond and at the flowers, and improved their time. Men of
business, even farmers, thought only of solitude and employment, and of
the great distance at which I dwelt from something or other; and though
they said that they loved a ramble in the woods occasionally, it was
obvious that they did not. Restless committed men, whose time was an
taken up in getting a living or keeping it; ministers who spoke of God
as if they enjoyed a monopoly of the subject, who could not bear all
kinds of opinions; doctors, lawyers, uneasy housekeepers who pried
into my cupboard and bed when I was out--how came Mrs.--to know that my
sheets were not as clean as hers?--young men who had ceased to be young,
and had concluded that it was safest to follow the beaten track of the
professions--all these generally said that it was not possible to do so
much good in my position. Ay! there was the rub. The old and infirm and
the timid, of whatever age or sex, thought most of sickness, and sudden
accident and death; to them life seemed full of danger--what danger is
there if you don't think of any?--and they thought that a prudent man
would carefully select the safest position, where Dr. B. might be
on hand at a moment's warning. To them the village was literally a
com-munity, a league for mutual defence, and you would suppose that they
would not go a-huckleberrying without a medicine chest. The amount of
it is, if a man is alive, there is always danger that he may die,
though the danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is
dead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs.
Finally, there were the self-styled reformers, the greatest bores of
all, who thought that I was forever singing,--
This is the house that I built;
This is the man that lives in the house that I
built;
but they did not know that the third line was,
These are the folks that worry the man
That lives in the house that I built.
I did not fear the hen-harriers, for I kept no chickens; but I feared
the men-harriers rather.
I had more cheering visitors than the last. Children come a-berrying,
railroad men taking a Sunday morning walk in clean shirts, fishermen and
hunters, poets and philosophers; in short, all honest pilgrims, who came
out to the woods for freedom's sake, and really left the village behind,
I was ready to greet with--"Welcome, Englishmen! welcome, Englishmen!"
for I had had communication with that race.
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