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, to-day, and to-morrow they have only one

word, and they express the variety of meaning by pointing backward for

yesterday, forward for to-morrow, 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 twos and threes

athwart my view, or perching restless on the white-pine boughs behind

my house, gives a voice to the air; a fishhawk 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 travelling 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 snow-shoes,

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 by-word; 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 snow-plough 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 hear 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 north-east snow storm, and I behold the ploughmen 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 cocoa-nut husks, the old

junk, gunny bags, scrap iron, and rusty nails. This car-load 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 Milwaukie, as those splendid articles,

English, French, or American prints, ginghams, muslins, &c., 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 bulk-head 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

car-load 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 whippoorwills 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 wood-side;

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 bowl 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

whippoorwill 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!