re always,
indeed, getting our living, and regulating our lives according to the
last and best mode we had learned, we should never be troubled with
ennui. Follow your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show
you a fresh prospect every hour. Housework was a pleasant pastime. When
my floor was dirty, I rose early, and, setting all my furniture out of
doors on the grass, bed and bedstead making but one budget, dashed water
on the floor, and sprinkled white sand from the pond on it, and then
with a broom scrubbed it clean and white; and by the time the villagers
had broken their fast the morning sun had dried my house sufficiently to
allow me to move in again, and my meditations were almost uninterupted.
It was pleasant to see my whole household effects out on the grass,
making a little pile like a gypsy's pack, and my three-legged table,
from which I did not remove the books and pen and ink, standing amid the
pines and hickories. They seemed glad to get out themselves, and as if
unwilling to be brought in. I was sometimes tempted to stretch an awning
over them and take my seat there. It was worth the while to see the sun
shine on these things, and hear the free wind blow on them; so much more
interesting most familiar objects look out of doors than in the house. A
bird sits on the next bough, life-everlasting grows under the table,
and blackberry vines run round its legs; pine cones, chestnut burs, and
strawberry leaves are strewn about. It looked as if this was the way
these forms came to be transferred to our furniture, to tables, chairs,
and bedsteads--because they once stood in their midst.

My house was on the side of a hill, immediately on the edge of
the larger wood, in the midst of a young forest of pitch pines and
hickories, and half a dozen rods from the pond, to which a narrow
footpath led down the hill. In my front yard grew the strawberry,
blackberry, and life-everlasting, johnswort and goldenrod, shrub oaks
and sand cherry, blueberry and groundnut. Near the end of May, the sand
cherry (Cerasus pumila) adorned the sides of the path with its delicate
flowers arranged in umbels cylindrically about its short stems, which
last, in the fall, weighed down with goodsized and handsome cherries,
fell over in wreaths like rays on every side. I tasted them out of
compliment to Nature, though they were scarcely palatable. The sumach
(Rhus glabra) grew luxuriantly about the house, pushing up through the
embankm