WALDEN AND ON THE DUTY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE. Henry David Thoreau

soundest part, though a good deal warped and made brittle by the

      sun. Door-sill 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

      to-night, he to vacate at five to-morrow 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 mean while 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 pleasure of construction to the

      carpenter? What does architecture amount to in the experience of the

      mass of men? I never in all my walks came across a man engaged in so

      simple and natural an occupation as building his house. We belong to

      the community. It is not the tailor alone who is the ninth part of a

      man; it is as much the preacher, and the merchant,