FORMER INHABITANTS; AND WINTER VISITORS |
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.
WINTER
ANIMALS
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