two reasons: firstly, in order not to waste time in building, and
not to want food the next season; secondly, in order not to discourage
poor laboring people whom they brought over in numbers from
Fatherland. In the course of three or four years, when the country
became adapted to agriculture, they built themselves handsome
houses, spending on them several thousands."

  In this course which our ancestors took there was a show of prudence
at least, as if their principle were to satisfy the more pressing
wants first. But are the more pressing wants satisfied now? When I
think of acquiring for myself one of our luxurious dwellings, I am
deterred, for, so to speak, the country is not yet adapted to human
culture, and we are still forced to cut our spiritual bread far
thinner than our forefathers did their wheaten. Not that all
architectural ornament is to be neglected even in the rudest
periods; but let our houses first be lined with beauty, where they
come in contact with our lives, like the tenement of the shellfish,
and not overlaid with it. But, alas! I have been inside one or two
of them, and know what they are lined with.

  Though we are not so degenerate but that we might possibly live in a
cave or a wigwam or wear skins today, it certainly is better to accept
the advantages, though so dearly bought, which the invention and
industry of mankind offer. In such a neighborhood as this, boards
and shingles, lime and bricks, are cheaper and more easily obtained
than suitable caves, or whole logs, or bark in sufficient
quantities, or even well-tempered clay or flat stones. I speak
understandingly on this subject, for I have made myself acquainted
with it both theoretically and practically. With a little more wit
we might use these materials so as to become richer than the richest
now are, and make our civilization a blessing. The civilized man is
a more experienced and wiser savage. But to make haste to my own
experiment.

  Near the end of March, 1845, I borrowed an axe and went down to
the woods by Walden Pond, nearest to where I intended to build my
house, and began to cut down some tall, arrowy white pines, still in
their youth, for timber. It is difficult to begin without borrowing,
but perhaps it is the most generous course thus to permit your
fellow-men to have an interest in your enterprise. The owner of the
axe, as he released his hold on it, said that it was the apple of
his eye; but I returned it sharper than I received it. It was a
pleasant hillside where I worked, covered with pine woods, through
which I looked out on the pond, and a small open field in the woods
where pines and hickories were springing up. The ice in the pond was
not yet dissolved, though there were some open spaces, and it was
all dark-colored and saturated with water. There were some slight
flurries of snow during the days that I worked there; but for the most
part when I came out on to the railroad, on my way home, its yellow
sand-heap stretched away gleaming in the hazy atmosphere, and the
rails shone in the spring sun, and I heard the lark and pewee and
other birds already come to commence another year with us. They were
pleasant spring days, in which the winter of man's discontent was
thawing as well as the earth, and the life that had lain torpid
began to stretch itself. One day, when my axe had come off and I had
cut a green hickory for a wedge, driving it with a stone, and had
placed the whole to soak in a pond-hole in order to swell the wood,
I saw a striped snake run into the water, and he lay on the bottom,
apparently without inconvenience, as long as I stayed there, or more
than a quarter of an hour; perhaps because he had not yet fairly
come out of the torpid state. It appeared to me that for a like reason
men remain in their present low and primitive condition; but if they
should feel the influence of the spring of springs arousing them, they
would of necessity rise to a higher and more ethereal life. I had
previously seen the snakes in frosty mornings in my path with portions
of their bodies still numb and inflexible, waiting for the sun to thaw
them. On the 1st of April it rained and melted the ice, and in the
early part of the day, which was very foggy, I heard a stray goose
groping about over the pond and cackling as if lost, or like the
spirit of the fog.

  So I went on for some days cutting and hewing timber, and also studs
and rafters, all with my narrow axe, not having many communicable or
scholar-like thoughts, singing to myself,

        Men say they know many things;

        But lo! they have taken wings-

        The arts and sciences,

        And a thousand appliances;

        The wind that blows

        Is all that anybody knows.

I hewed the main timbers six inches square, most of the studs on two
sides only, and the rafters and floor timbers on one side, leaving the
rest of the bark on, so that they were just as straight and much
stronger than sawed ones. Each stick was carefully mortised or tenoned
by its stump, for I had borrowed other tools by this time. My days
in the woods were not very long ones; yet I usually carried my
dinner of bread and butter, and read the newspaper in which it was
wrapped, at noon, sitting amid the green pine boughs which I had cut
off, and to my bread was imparted some of their fragrance, for my
hands were covered with a thick coat of pitch. Before I had done I was
more the friend than the foe of the pine tree, though I had cut down
some of them, having become better acquainted with it. Sometimes a
rambler in the wood was attracted by the sound of my axe, and we