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.