I WEATHERED some merry snow-storms, and spent some cheerful winter
evenings by my fireside, 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 my 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 row 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 goldenrod (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 earthenware, 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 greatcoat in midsummer, 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 overrun 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, thimbleberries,
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, hi front-yard plots- now standing by wallsides 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 lowland
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 bills when the show 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 be preserved a pennisular 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 northwest 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
midwinter, 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 seared 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 everywhere, I sometimes expected the Visitor who never
comes. The Vishnu Purana says, "The house-holder is to remain at
eventide in his courtyard 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.