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1The north wind had already begun to cool the pond, though it took many weeks of steady blowing to accomplish it, it is
2so deep. When I began to have a fire at evening, before I plastered my house, the chimney carried smoke particularly
3well, because of the numerous chinks between the boards. Yet I passed some cheerful evenings in that cool and airy
4apartment, surrounded by the rough brown boards full of knots, and rafters with the bark on high overhead. My house
5never pleased my eye so much after it was plastered, though I was obliged to confess that it was more comfortable.
6Should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity over-head, where flickering
7shadows may play at evening about the rafters? These forms are more agreeable to the fancy and imagination than fresco
8paintings or other the most expensive furniture. I now first began to inhabit my house, I may say, when I began to use
9it 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
10good 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
11satisfaction than usual. My dwelling was small, and I could hardly entertain an echo in it; but it seemed larger for
12being a single apartment and remote from neighbors. All the attractions of a house were concentrated in one room; it was
13kitchen, chamber, parlor, and keeping-room; and whatever satisfaction parent or child, master or servant, derive from
14living in a house, I enjoyed it all. Cato says, the master of a family (patremfamilias) must have in his rustic villa
15"cellam oleariam, vinariam, dolia multa, uti lubeat caritatem expectare, et rei, et virtuti, et gloriæ erit," that is,
16"an oil and wine cellar, many casks, so that it may be pleasant to expect hard times; it will be for his advantage, and
17virtue, and glory." I had in my cellar a firkin of potatoes, about two quarts of peas with the weevil in them, and on my
18shelf a little rice, a jug of molasses, and of rye and Indian meal a peck each. I sometimes dream of a larger and more
19populous house, standing in a golden age, of enduring materials, and without ginger-bread work, which shall still
20consist of only one room, a vast, rude, substantial, primitive hall, without ceiling or plastering, with bare rafters
21and purlins supporting a sort of lower heaven over one's head,--useful to keep off rain and snow; where the king and
22queen posts stand out to receive your homage, when you have done reverence to the prostrate Saturn of an older dynasty
23on stepping over the sill; a cavernous house, wherein you must reach up a torch upon a pole to see the roof; where some
24may live in the fire-place, some in the recess of a window, and some on settles, some at one end of the hall, some at
25another, and some aloft on rafters with the spiders, if they choose; a house which you have got into when you have
26opened the outside door, and the ceremony is over; where the weary traveller may wash, and eat, and converse, and sleep,
27without further journey; such a shelter as you would be glad to reach in a tempestuous night, containing all the
28essentials of a house, and nothing for house-keeping; where you can see all the treasures of the house at one view, and
29every thing hangs upon its peg, that a man should use; at once kitchen, pantry, parlor, chamber, store-house, and
30garret; where you can see so necessary a thing as a barrel or a ladder, so convenient a thing as a cupboard, and hear
31the pot boil, and pay your respects to the fire that cooks your dinner and the oven that bakes your bread, and the
32necessary furniture and utensils are the chief ornaments; where the washing is not put out, nor the fire, nor the
33mistress, and perhaps you are sometimes requested to move from off the trap-door, when the cook would descend into the
34cellar, and so learn whether the ground is solid or hollow beneath you without stamping. A house whose inside is as open
35and 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
36inhabitants; where to be a guest is to be presented with the freedom of the house, and not to be carefully excluded from
37seven eighths of it, shut up in a particular cell, and told to make yourself at home there,--in solitary confinement.
38Nowadays the host does not admit you to his hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourself somewhere in his
39alley, and hospitality is the art of keeping you at the greatest distance. There is as much secrecy about the cooking as
40if 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
41ordered 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
42who lived simply in such a house as I have described, if I were going their way; but backing out of a modern palace will
43be 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
44would lose all its nerve and degenerate into palaver wholly, our lives pass at such remoteness from its symbols, and its
45metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far fetched, through slides and dumb-waiters, as it were; in other words, the
46parlor is so far from the kitchen and workshop. The dinner even is only the parable of a dinner, commonly. As if only
47the savage dwelt near enough to Nature and Truth to borrow a trope from them. How can the scholar, who dwells away in
48the North West Territory or the Isle of Man, tell what is parliamentary in the kitchen? However, only one or two of my
49guests were ever bold enough to stay and eat a hasty-pudding with me; but when they saw that crisis approaching they
50beat a hasty retreat rather, as if it would shake the house to its foundations. Nevertheless, it stood through a great
51many hasty-puddings. I did not plaster till it was freezing weather. I brought over some whiter and cleaner sand for
52this purpose from the opposite shore of the pond in a boat, a sort of conveyance which would have tempted me to go much
53farther if necessary. My house had in the mean while been shingled down to the ground on every side. In lathing I was
54pleased to be able to send home each nail with a single blow of the hammer, and it was my ambition to transfer the
55plaster from the board to the wall neatly and rapidly. I remembered the story of a conceited fellow, who, in fine
56clothes, was wont to lounge about the village once, giving advice to workmen. Venturing one day to substitute deeds for
57words, he turned up his cuffs, seized a plasterer's board, and having loaded his trowel without mishap, with a
58complacent look toward the lathing overhead, made a bold gesture thitherward; and straightway, to his complete
59discomfiture, received the whole contents in his ruffled bosom. I admired anew the economy and convenience of
60plastering, which so effectually shuts out the cold and takes a handsome finish, and I learned the various casualties to
61which the plasterer is liable. I was surprised to see how thirsty the bricks were which drank up all the moisture in my
62plaster before I had smoothed it, and how many pailfuls of water it takes to christen a new hearth. I had the previous
63winter made a small quantity of lime by burning the shells of the Unio fluviatilis, which our river affords, for the
64sake of the experiment; so that I knew where my materials came from. I might have got good limestone within a mile or
65two and burned it myself, if I had cared to do so.
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