chatted pleasantly over the chips which I had made.

  By the middle of April, for I made no haste in my work, but rather
made the most of it, my house was framed and ready for the raising.
I had already bought the shanty of James Collins, an Irishman who
worked on the Fitchburg Railroad, for boards. James Collins' shanty
was considered an uncommonly fine one. When I called to see it he
was not at home. I walked about the outside, at first unobserved
from within, the window was so deep and high. It was of small
dimensions, with a peaked cottage roof, and not much else to be
seen, the dirt being raised five feet all around as if it were a
compost heap. The roof was the soundest part, though a good deal
warped and made brittle by the sun. Doorsill there was none, but a
perennial passage for the hens under the door-board. Mrs. C. came to
the door and asked me to view it from the inside. The hens were driven
in by my approach. It was dark, and had a dirt floor for the most
part, dank, clammy, and aguish, only here a board and there a board
which would not bear removal. She lighted a lamp to show me the inside
of the roof and the walls, and also that the board floor extended
under the bed, warning me not to step into the cellar, a sort of
dust hole two feet deep. In her own words, they were good boards
overhead, good boards all around, and a good window"- of two whole
squares originally, only the cat had passed out that way lately. There
was a stove, a bed, and a place to sit, an infant in the house where
it was born, a silk parasol, gilt-framed looking-glass, and a patent
new coffee-mill nailed to an oak sapling, all told. The bargain was
soon concluded, for James had in the meanwhile returned. I to pay four
dollars and twenty-five cents tonight, he to vacate at five tomorrow
morning, selling to nobody else meanwhile: I to take possession at
six. It were well, he said, to be there early, and anticipate
certain indistinct but wholly unjust claims on the score of ground
rent and fuel. This he assured me was the only encumbrance. At six I
passed him and his family on the road. One large bundle held their
all- bed, coffee-mill, looking-glass, hens- all but the cat; she
took to the woods and became a wild cat, and, as I learned
afterward, trod in a trap set for woodchucks, and so became a dead cat
at last.

  I took down this dwelling the same morning, drawing the nails, and
removed it to the pond-side by small cartloads, spreading the boards
on the grass there to bleach and warp back again in the sun. One early
thrush gave me a note or two as I drove along the woodland path. I was
informed treacherously by a young Patrick that neighbor Seeley, an
Irishman, in the intervals of the carting, transferred the still
tolerable, straight, and drivable nails, staples, and spikes to his
pocket, and then stood when I came back to pass the time of day, and
look freshly up, unconcerned, with spring thoughts, at the
devastation; there being a dearth of work, as he said. He was there to
represent spectatordom, and help make this seemingly insignificant
event one with the removal of the gods of Troy.

  I dug my cellar in the side of a hill sloping to the south, where
a woodchuck had formerly dug his burrow, down through sumach and
blackberry roots, and the lowest stain of vegetation, six feet
square by seven deep, to a fine sand where potatoes would not freeze
in any winter. The sides were left shelving, and not stoned; but the
sun having never shone on them, the sand still keeps its place. It was
but two hours' work. I took particular pleasure in this breaking of
ground, for in almost all latitudes men dig into the earth for an
equable temperature. Under the most splendid house in the city is
still to be found the cellar where they store their roots as of old,
and long after the superstructure has disappeared posterity remark its
dent in the earth. The house is still but a sort of porch at the
entrance of a burrow.

  At length, in the beginning of May, with the help of some of my
acquaintances, rather to improve so good an occasion for
neighborliness than from any necessity, I set up the frame of my
house. No man was ever more honored in the character of his raisers
than I. They are destined, I trust, to assist at the raising of
loftier structures one day. I began to occupy my house on the 4th of
July, as soon as it was boarded and roofed, for the boards were
carefully feather-edged and lapped, so that it was perfectly
impervious to rain, but before boarding I laid the foundation of a
chimney at one end, bringing two cartloads of stones up the hill
from the pond in my arms. I built the chimney after my hoeing in the
fall, before a fire became necessary for warmth, doing my cooking in
the meanwhile out of doors on the ground, early in the morning:
which mode I still think is in some respects more convenient and
agreeable than the usual one. When it stormed before my bread was
baked, I fixed a few boards over the fire, and sat under them to watch
my loaf, and passed some pleasant hours in that way. In those days,
when my hands were much employed, I read but little, but the least
scraps of paper which lay on the ground, my holder, or tablecloth,
afforded me as much entertainment, in fact answered the same purpose
as the Iliad.

  It would be worth the while to build still more deliberately than
I did, considering, for instance, what foundation a door, a window,
a cellar, a garret, have in the nature of man, and perchance never
raising any superstructure until we found a better reason for it
than our temporal necessities even. There is some of the same
fitness in a man's building his own house that there is in a bird's
building its own nest. Who knows but if men constructed their
dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and
families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be
universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so
engaged? But alas! we do like cowbirds and cuckoos, which lay their
eggs in nests which other birds have built, and cheer no traveller
with their chattering and unmusical notes. Shall we forever resign the