IN OCTOBER I went a-graping to the river meadows, and loaded
myself with clusters more precious for their beauty and fragrance than
for food. There, too, I admired, though I did not gather, the
cranberries, small waxen gems, pendants of the meadow grass, pearly
and red, which the farmer plucks with an ugly rake, leaving the smooth
meadow in a snarl, heedlessly measuring them by the bushel and the
dollar only, and sells the spoils of the meads to Boston and New York;
destined to be jammed, to satisfy the tastes of lovers of Nature
there. So butchers rake the tongues of bison out of the prairie grass,
regardless of the torn and drooping plant. The barberry's brilliant
fruit was likewise food for my eyes merely; but I collected a small
store of wild apples for coddling, which the proprietor and travellers
had overlooked. When chestnuts were ripe I laid up half a bushel for
winter. It was very exciting at that season to roam the then boundless
chestnut woods of Lincoln- they now sleep their long sleep under the
railroad- with a bag on my shoulder, and a stick to open burs with
in my hand, for I did not always wait for the frost, amid the rustling
of leaves and the loud reproofs of the red squirrels and the jays,
whose half-consumed nuts I sometimes stole, for the burs which they
had selected were sure to contain sound ones. Occasionally I climbed
and shook the trees. They grew also behind my house, and one large
tree, which almost overshadowed it, was, when in flower, a bouquet
which scented the whole neighborhood, but the squirrels and the jays
got most of its fruit; the last coming in flocks early in the
morning and picking the nuts out of the burs before they fell, I
relinquished these trees to them and visited the more distant woods
composed wholly of chestnut. These nuts, as far as they went, were a
good substitute for bread. Many other substitutes might, perhaps, be
found. Digging one day for fishworms, I discovered the groundnut
(Apios tuberosa) on its string, the potato of the aborigines, a sort
of fabulous fruit, which I had begun to doubt if I had ever dug and
eaten in childhood, as I had told, and had not dreamed it. I had often
since seen its crumpled red velvety blossom supported by the stems
of other plants without knowing it to be the same. Cultivation has
well-nigh exterminated it. It has a sweetish taste, much like that
of a frost-bitten potato, and I found it better boiled than roasted.
This tuber seemed like a faint promise of Nature to rear her own
children and feed them simply here at some future period. In these
days of fatted cattle and waving grain-fields this humble root,
which was once the totem of an Indian tribe, is quite forgotten, or
known only by its flowering vine; but let wild Nature reign here
once more, and the tender and luxurious English grains will probably
disappear before a myriad of foes, and without the care of man the
crow may carry back even the last seed of corn to the great
cornfield of the Indian's God in the southwest, whence he is said to
have brought it; but the now almost exterminated ground-nut will
perhaps revive and flourish in spite of frosts and wildness, prove
itself indigenous, and resume its ancient importance and dignity as
the diet of the hunter tribe. Some Indian Ceres or Minerva must have
been the inventor and bestower of it; and when the reign of poetry
commences here, its leaves and string of nuts may be represented on
our works of art.
Already, by the first of September, I had seen two or three small
maples turned scarlet across the pond, beneath where the white stems
of three aspens diverged, at the point of a promontory, next the
water. Ah, many a tale their color told! Arid gradually from week to
week the character of each tree came out, and it admired itself
reflected in the smooth mirror of the lake. Each morning the manager
of this gallery substituted some new picture, distinguished by more
brilliant or harmonious coloring, for the old upon the walls.
The wasps came by thousands to my lodge in October, as to winter
quarters, and settled on my windows within and on the walls
overhead, sometimes deterring visitors from entering. Each morning,
when they were numbed with cold, I swept some of them out, but I did
not trouble myself much to get rid of them; I even felt complimented
by their regarding my house as a desirable shelter. They never
molested me seriously, though they bedded with me; and they
gradually disappeared, into what crevices I do not know, avoiding
winter and unspeakable cold.
Like the wasps, before I finally went into winter quarters in
November, I used to resort to the northeast side of Walden, which
the sun, reflected from the pitch pine woods and the stony shore, made
the fireside of the pond; it is so much pleasanter and wholesomer to
be warmed by the sun while you can be, than by an artificial fire. I
thus warmed myself by the still glowing embers which the summer,
like a departed hunter, had left.
When I came to build my chimney I studied masonry. My bricks,
being second-hand ones, required to be cleaned with a trowel, so
that I learned more than usual of the qualities of bricks and trowels.
The mortar on them was fifty years old, and was said to be still
growing harder; but this is one of those sayings which men love to
repeat whether they are true or not. Such sayings themselves grow
harder and adhere more firmly with age, and it would take many blows
with a trowel to clean an old wiseacre of them. Many of the villages
of Mesopotamia are built of secondhand bricks of a very good
quality, obtained from the ruins of Babylon, and the cement on them is
older and probably harder still. However that may be, I was struck
by the peculiar toughness of the steel which bore so many violent
blows without being worn out. As my bricks had been in a chimney
before, though I did not read the name of Nebuchadnezzar on them, I
picked out its many fireplace bricks as I could find, to save work and
waste, and I filled the spaces between the bricks about the
fireplace with stones from the pond shore, and also made my mortar
with the white sand from the same place. I lingered most about the
fireplace, as the most vital part of the house. Indeed, I worked so
deliberately, that though I commenced at the ground in the morning,
a course of bricks raised a few inches above the floor served for my
pillow at night; yet I did not get a stiff neck for it that I
remember; my stiff neck is of older date. I took a poet to board for a
fortnight about those times, which caused me to be put to it for room.
He brought his own knife, though I had two, and we used to scour
them by thrusting them into the earth. He shared with me the labors of
cooking. I was pleased to see my work rising so square and solid by
degrees, and reflected, that, if it proceeded slowly, it was
calculated to endure a long time. The chimney is to some extent an
independent structure, standing on the ground, and rising through
the house to the heavens; even after the house is burned it still
stands sometimes, and its importance and independence are apparent.
This was toward the end of summer. It was now November.
The north wind had already begun to cool the pond, though it took
many weeks of steady blowing to accomplish it, it is so deep. When I
began to have a fire at evening, before I plastered my house, the
chimney carried smoke particularly well, because of the numerous
chinks between the boards. Yet I passed some cheerful evenings in that
cool and airy apartment, surrounded by the rough brown boards full
of knots, and rafters with the bark on high overhead. My house never
pleased my eye so much after it was plastered, though I was obliged to
confess that it was more comfortable. Should not every apartment in
which man dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead,
where flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters?
These forms are more agreeable to the fancy and imagination than
fresco paintings or other the most expensive furniture. I now first
began to inhabit my house, I may say, when I began to use it for
warmth as well as shelter. I had got a couple of old fire-dogs to keep
the wood from the hearth, and it did me good to see the soot form on
the back of the chimney which I had built, and I poked the fire with
more right and more satisfaction than usual. My dwelling was small,
and I could hardly entertain an echo in it; but it seemed larger for
being a single apartment and remote from neighbors. All the
attractions of a house were concentrated in one room; it was
kitchen, chamber, parlor, and keeping-room; and whatever
satisfaction parent or child, master or servant, derive from living in
a house, I enjoyed it all. Cato says, the master of a family
(patremfamilias) must have in his rustic villa "cellam oleariam,
vinariam, dolia multa, uti lubeat caritatem expectare, et rei, et
virtuti, et gloriae erit," that is, "an oil and wine cellar, many
casks, so that it may be pleasant to expect hard times; it will be for
his advantage, and virtue, and glory." I had in my cellar a firkin
of potatoes, about two quarts of peas with the weevil in them, and
on my shelf a little rice, a jug of molasses, and of rye and Indian
meal a peck each.
I sometimes dream of a larger and more populous house, standing in a
golden age, of enduring materials, and without gingerbread work, which
shall still consist of only one room, a vast, rude, substantial,
primitive hall, without ceiling or plastering, with bare rafters and
purlins supporting a sort of lower heaven over one's head-useful to
keep off rain and snow, where the king and queen posts stand out to
receive your homage, when you have done reverence to the prostrate
Saturn of an older dynasty on stepping over the sill; a cavernous
house, wherein you must reach up a torch upon a pole to see the
roof; where some may live in the fireplace, some in the recess of a
window, and some on settles, some at one end of the hall, some at
another, and some aloft on rafters with the spiders, if they choose; a
house which you have got into when you have opened the outside door,
and the ceremony is over; where the weary traveller may wash, and eat,
and converse, and sleep, without further journey; such a shelter as
you would be glad to reach in a tempestuous night, containing all
the essentials of a house, and nothing for house-keeping; where you
can see all the treasures of the house at one view, and everything
hangs upon its peg, that a man should use; at once kitchen, pantry,
parlor, chamber, storehouse, and garret; where you can see so
necessary a thin, as a barrel or a ladder, so convenient a thing as
a cupboard, and hear the pot boil, and pay your respects to the fire
that cooks your dinner, and the oven that bakes your bread, and the
necessary furniture and utensils are the chief ornaments; where the
washing is not put out, nor the fire, nor the mistress, and perhaps
you are sometimes requested to move from off the trapdoor, when the
cook would descend into the cellar, and so learn whether the ground is
solid or hollow beneath you without stamping. A house whose inside
is as open and manifest as a bird's nest, and you cannot go in at
the front door and out at the back without seeing some of its
inhabitants; where to be a guest is to be presented with the freedom
of the house, and not to be carefully excluded from seven eighths of
it, shut up in a particular cell, and told to make yourself at home
therein solitary confinement. Nowadays the host does not admit you
to his hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourself
somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art of keeping you at
the greatest distance. There is as much secrecy about the cooking as
if he had a design to poison you. I am aware that I have been on
many a man's premises, and might have been legally ordered off, but
I am not aware that I have been in many men's houses. I might visit in
my old clothes a king and queen who lived simply in such a house as
I have described, if I were going their way; but backing out of a
modern palace will be all that I shall desire to learn, if ever I am
caught in one.
It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose
all its nerve and degenerate into palaver wholly, our lives pass at
such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are
necessarily so far fetched, through slides and dumbwaiters, as it
were; in other words, the parlor is so far from the kitchen and
workshop. The dinner even is only the parable of a dinner, commonly.
As if only the savage dwelt near enough to Nature and Truth to
borrow a trope from them. How can the scholar, who dwells away in
the North West Territory or the Isle of Man, tell what is
parliamentary in the kitchen?
However, only one or two of my guests were ever bold enough to
stay and eat a hasty-pudding with me; but when they saw that crisis
approaching they beat a hasty retreat rather, as if it would shake the
house to its foundations. Nevertheless, it stood through a great
many hasty-puddings.
I did not plaster till it was freezing weather. I brought over
some whiter and cleaner sand for this purpose from the opposite
shore of the pond in a boat, a sort of conveyance which would have
tempted me to go much farther if necessary. My house had in the
meanwhile been shingled down to the ground on every side. In lathing I
was pleased to be able to send home each nail with a single blow of
the hammer, and it was my ambition to transfer the plaster from the
board to the wall neatly and rapidly. I remembered the story of a
conceited fellow, who, in fine clothes, was wont to lounge about the
village once, giving advice to workmen. Venturing one day to
substitute deeds for words, he turned up his cuffs, seized a
plasterer's board, and having loaded his trowel without mishap, with a
complacent look toward the lathing overhead, made a bold gesture
thitherward; and straightway, to his complete discomfiture, received
the whole contents in his ruffled bosom. I admired anew the economy
and convenience of plastering, which so effectually shuts out the cold
and takes a handsome finish, and I learned the various casualties to
which the plasterer is liable. I was surprised to see how thirsty
the bricks were which drank up all the moisture in my plaster before I
had smoothed it, and how many pailfuls of water it takes to christen a
new hearth. I had the previous winter made a small quantity of lime by
burning the shells of the Unio fluviatilis, which our river affords,
for the sake of the experiment; so that I knew where my materials came
from. I might have got good limestone within a mile or two and
burned it myself, if I had cared to do so.
The pond had in the meanwhile skimmed over in the shadiest and
shallowest coves, some days or even weeks before the general freezing.
The first ice is especially interesting and perfect, being hard, dark,
and transparent, and affords the best opportunity that ever offers for
examining the bottom where it is shallow; for you can lie at your
length on ice only an inch thick, like a skater insect on the
surface of the water, and study the bottom at your leisure, only two
or three inches distant, like a picture behind a glass, and the
water is necessarily always smooth then. There are many furrows in the
sand where some creature has travelled about and doubled on its
tracks; and, for wrecks, it is strewn with the cases of caddis-worms
made of minute grains of white quartz. Perhaps these have creased
it, for you find some of their cases in the furrows, though they are
deep and broad for them to make. But the ice itself is the object of
most interest, though you must improve the earliest opportunity to
study it. If you examine it closely the morning after it freezes,
you find that the greater part of the bubbles, which at first appeared
to be within it, are against its under surface, and that more are
continually rising from the bottom; while the ice is as yet
comparatively solid and dark, that is, you see the water through it.
These bubbles are from an eightieth to an eighth of an inch in
diameter, very clear and beautiful, and you see your face reflected in
them through the ice. There may be thirty or forty of them to a square
inch. There are also already within the ice narrow oblong
perpendicular bubbles about half an inch long, sharp cones with the
apex upward; or oftener, if the ice is quite fresh, minute spherical
bubbles one directly above another, like a string of beads. But
these within the ice are not so numerous nor obvious as those beneath.
I sometimes used to cast on stones to try the strength of the ice, and
those which broke through carried in air with them, which formed
very large and conspicuous white bubbles beneath. One day when I
came to the same place forty-eight hours afterward, I found that those
large bubbles were still perfect, though an inch more of ice had
formed, as I could see distinctly by the seam in the edge of a cake.
But as the last two days had been very warm, like an Indian summer,
the ice was not now transparent, showing the dark green color of the
water, and the bottom, but opaque and whitish or gray, and though
twice as thick was hardly stronger than before, for the air bubbles
had greatly expanded under this heat and run together, and lost
their regularity; they were no longer one directly over another, but
often like silvery coins poured from a bag, one overlapping another,
or in thin flakes, as if occupying slight cleavages. The beauty of the
ice was gone, and it was too late to study the bottom. Being curious
to know what position my great bubbles occupied with regard to the new
ice, I broke out a cake containing a middling sized one, and turned it
bottom upward. The new ice had formed around and under the bubble,
so that it was included between the two ices. It was wholly in the
lower ice, but close against the upper, and was flattish, or perhaps
slightly lenticular, with a rounded edge, a quarter of an inch deep by
four inches in diameter; and I was surprised to find that directly
under the bubble the ice was melted with great regularity in the
form of a saucer reversed, to the height of five eighths of an inch in
the middle, leaving a thin partition there between the water and the
bubble, hardly an eighth of an inch thick; and in many places the
small bubbles in this partition had burst out downward, and probably
there was no ice at all under the largest bubbles, which were a foot
in diameter. I inferred that the infinite number of minute bubbles
which I had first seen against the under surface of the ice were now
frozen in likewise, and that each, in its degree, had operated like
a burning-glass on the ice beneath to melt and rot it. These are the
little air-guns which contribute to make the ice crack and whoop.
At length the winter set in good earnest, just as I had finished
plastering, and the wind began to howl around the house as if it had
not had permission to do so till then. Night after night the geese
came lumbering in the dark with a clangor and a whistling of wings,
even after the ground was covered with snow, some to alight in Walden,
and some flying low over the woods toward Fair Haven, bound for
Mexico. Several times, when returning from the village at ten or
eleven o'clock at night, I heard the tread of a flock of geese, or
else ducks, on the dry leaves in the woods by a pond-hole behind my
dwelling, where they had come up to feed, and the faint honk or
quack of their leader as they hurried off. In 1845 Walden froze
entirely over for the first time on the night of the 22d of
December, Flint's and other shallower ponds and the river having
been frozen ten days or more; in '46, the 16th; in '49, about the
31st; and in '50, about the 27th of December; in '52, the 5th of
January; in '53, the 31st of December. The snow had already covered
the ground since the 25th of November, and surrounded me suddenly with
the scenery of winter. I withdrew yet farther into my shell, and
endeavored to keep a bright fire both within my house and within my
breast. My employment out of doors now was to collect the dead wood in
the forest, bringing it in my hands or on my shoulders, or sometimes
trailing a dead pine tree under each arm to my shed. An old forest
fence which had seen its best days was a great haul for me. I
sacrificed it to Vulcan, for it was past serving the god Terminus. How
much more interesting an event is that man's supper who has just
been forth in the snow to hunt, nay, you might say, steal, the fuel to
cook it with! His bread and meat are sweet. There are enough fagots
and waste wood of all kinds in the forests of most of our towns to
support many fires, but which at present warm none, and, some think,
hinder the growth of the young wood. There was also the driftwood of
the pond. In the course of the summer I had discovered a raft of pitch
pine logs with the bark on, pinned together by the Irish when the
railroad was built. This I hauled up partly on the shore. After
soaking two years and then lying high six months it was perfectly
sound, though waterlogged past drying. I amused myself one winter
day with sliding this piecemeal across the pond, nearly half a mile,
skating behind with one end of a log fifteen feet long on my shoulder,
and the other on the ice; or I tied several logs together with a birch
withe, and then, with a longer birch or alder which had a book at
the end, dragged them across. Though completely waterlogged and almost
as heavy as lead, they not only burned long, but made a very hot fire;
nay, I thought that they burned better for the soaking, as if the
pitch, being confined by the water, burned longer, as in a lamp.
Gilpin, in his account of the forest borderers of England, says that
"the encroachments of trespassers, and the houses and fences thus
raised on the borders of the forest," were "considered as great
nuisances by the old forest law, and were severely punished under
the name of purprestures, as tending ad terrorem ferarum- ad
nocumentum forestae, etc.," to the frightening of the game and the
detriment of the forest. But I was interested in the preservation of
the venison and the vert more than the hunters or woodchoppers, and as
much as though I had been the Lord Warden himself; and if any part was
burned, though I burned it myself by accident, I grieved with a
grief that lasted longer and was more inconsolable than that of the
proprietors; nay, I grieved when it was cut down by the proprietors
themselves. I would that our farmers when they cut down a forest
felt some of that awe which the old Romans did when they came to thin,
or let in the light to, a consecrated grove (lucum conlucare), that
is, would believe that it is sacred to some god. The Roman made an
expiatory offering, and prayed, Whatever god or goddess thou art to
whom this grove is sacred, be propitious to me, my family, and
children, etc.
It is remarkable what a value is still put upon wood even in this
age and in this new country, a value more permanent and universal than
that of gold. After all our discoveries and inventions no man will
go by a pile of wood. It is as precious to us as it was to our Saxon
and Norman ancestors. If they made their bows of it, we make our
gun-stocks of it. Michaux, more than thirty years ago, says that the
price of wood for fuel in New York and Philadelphia "nearly equals,
and sometimes exceeds, that of the best wood in Paris, though this
immense capital annually requires more than three hundred thousand
cords, and is surrounded to the distance of three hundred miles by
cultivated plains." In this town the price of wood rises almost
steadily, and the only question is, how much higher it is to be this
year than it was the last. Mechanics and tradesmen who come in
person to the forest on no other errand, are sure to attend the wood
auction, and even pay a high price for the privilege of gleaning after
the woodchopper. It is now many years that men have resorted to the
forest for fuel and the materials of the arts: the New Englander and
the New Hollander, the Parisian and the Celt, the farmer and Robin
Hood, Goody Blake and Harry Gill; in most parts of the world the
prince and the peasant, the scholar and the savage, equally require
still a few sticks from the forest to warm them and cook their food.
Neither could I do without them.
Every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affection. I love to
have mine before my window, and the more chips the better to remind me
of my pleasing work. I had an old axe which nobody claimed, with which
by spells in winter days, on the sunny side of the house, I played
about the stumps which I had got out of my bean-field. As my driver
prophesied when I was plowing, they warmed me twice- once while I
was splitting them, and again when they were on the fire, so that no
fuel could give out more heat. As for the axe, I was advised to get
the village blacksmith to "jump" it; but I jumped him, and, putting
a hickory helve from the woods into it, made it do. If it was dull, it
was at least hung true.
A few pieces of fat pine were a great treasure. It is interesting to
remember how much of this food for fire is still concealed in the
bowels of the earth. In previous years I had often gone prospecting
over some bare hillside, where a pitch pine wood had formerly stood,
and got out the fat pine roots. They are almost indestructible. Stumps
thirty or forty years old, at least, will still be sound at the
core, though the sapwood has all become vegetable mould, as appears by
the scales of the thick bark forming a ring level with the earth
four or five inches distant from the heart. With axe and shovel you
explore this mine, and follow the marrowy store, yellow as beef
tallow, or as if you had struck on a vein of gold, deep into the
earth. But commonly I kindled my fire with the dry leaves of the
forest, which I had stored up in my shed before the snow came. Green
hickory finely split makes the woodchopper's kindlings, when he has
a camp in the woods. Once in a while I got a little of this. When
the villagers were lighting their fires beyond the horizon, I too gave
notice to the various wild inhabitants of Walden vale, by a smoky
streamer from my chimney, that I was awake.
Light-winged Smoke, Icarian bird,
Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight,
Lark without song, and messenger of dawn,
Circling above the hamlets as thy nest;
Or else, departing dream, and shadowy form
Of midnight vision, gathering up thy skirts;
By night star-veiling, and by day
Darkening the light and blotting out the sun;
Go thou my incense upward from this hearth,
And ask the gods to pardon this clear flame.
Hard green wood just cut, though I used but little of that, answered
my purpose better than any other. I sometimes left a good fire when
I went to take a walk in a winter afternoon; and when I returned,
three or four hours afterward, it would be still alive and glowing. My
house was not empty though I was gone. It was as if I had left a
cheerful housekeeper behind. It was I and Fire that lived there; and
commonly my housekeeper proved trustworthy. One day, however, as I was
splitting wood, I thought that I would just look in at the window
and see if the house was not on fire; it was the only time I
remember to have been particularly anxious on this score; so I
looked and saw that a spark had caught my bed, and I went in and
extinguished it when it had burned a place as big as my hand. But my
house occupied so sunny and sheltered a position, and its roof was
so low, that I could afford to let the fire go out in the middle of
almost any winter day.
The moles nested in my cellar, nibbling every third potato, and
making a snug bed even there of some hair left after plastering and of
brown paper; for even the wildest animals love comfort and warmth as
well as man, and they survive the winter only because they are so
careful to secure them. Some of my friends spoke as if I was coming to
the woods on purpose to freeze myself. The animal merely makes a
bed, which he warms with his body, in a sheltered place; but man,
having discovered fire, boxes up some air in a spacious apartment, and
warms that, instead of robbing himself, makes that his bed, in which
he can move about divested of more cumbrous clothing, maintain a
kind of summer in the midst of winter, and by means of windows even
admit the light, and with a lamp lengthen out the day. Thus he goes
a step or two beyond instinct, and saves a little time for the fine
arts. Though, when I had been exposed to the rudest blasts a long
time, my whole body began to grow torpid, when I reached the genial
atmosphere of my house I soon recovered my faculties and prolonged
my life. But the most luxuriously housed has little to boast of in
this respect, nor need we trouble ourselves to speculate how the human
race may be at last destroyed. It would be easy to cut their threads
any time with a little sharper blast from the north. We go on dating
from Cold Fridays and Great Snows; but a little colder Friday, or
greater snow would put a period to man's existence on the globe.
The next winter I used a small cooking-stove for economy, since I
did not own the forest; but it did not keep fire so well as the open
fireplace. Cooking was then, for the most part, no longer a poetic,
but merely a chemic process. It will soon be forgotten, in these
days of stoves, that we used to roast potatoes in the ashes, after the
Indian fashion. The stove not only took up room and scented the house,
but it concealed the fire, and I felt as if I had lost a companion.
You can always see a face in the fire. The laborer, looking into it at
evening, pulifies his thoughts of the dross and earthiness which
they have accumulated during the day. But I could no longer sit and
look into the fire, and the pertinent words of a poet recurred to me
with new force.
"Never, bright flame, may be denied to me
Thy dear, life imaging, close sympathy.
What but my hopes shot upward e'er so bright?
What but my fortunes sunk so low in night?
Why art thou banished from our hearth and hall,
Thou who art welcomed and beloved by all?
Was thy existence then too fanciful
For our life's common light, who are so dull?
Did thy bright gleam mysterious converse hold
With our congenial souls? secrets too bold?
Well, we are safe and strong, for now we sit
Beside a hearth where no dim shadows flit,
Where nothing cheers nor saddens, but a fire
Warms feet and hands- nor does to more aspire;
By whose compact utilitarian heap
The present may sit down and go to sleep,
Nor fear the ghosts who from the dim past walked,
And with us by the unequal light of the old wood fire talked."
FORMER INHABITANTS; AND WINTER VISITORS
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