s are sound, his spirits
never flag. Even the sailor on the Atlantic and Pacific is awakened by
his voice; but its shrill sound never roused me from my slumbers. I kept
neither dog, cat, cow, pig, nor hens, so that you would have said
there was a deficiency of domestic sounds; neither the churn, nor the
spinning-wheel, nor even the singing of the kettle, nor the hissing of
the urn, nor children crying, to comfort one. An old-fashioned man would
have lost his senses or died of ennui before this. Not even rats in the
wall, for they were starved out, or rather were never baited in--only
squirrels on the roof and under the floor, a whip-poor-will on the
ridge-pole, a blue jay screaming beneath the window, a hare or woodchuck
under the house, a screech owl or a cat owl behind it, a flock of wild
geese or a laughing loon on the pond, and a fox to bark in the night.
Not even a lark or an oriole, those mild plantation birds, ever visited
my clearing. No cockerels to crow nor hens to cackle in the yard. No
yard! but unfenced nature reaching up to your very sills. A young forest
growing up under your meadows, and wild sumachs and blackberry vines
breaking through into your cellar; sturdy pitch pines rubbing and
creaking against the shingles for want of room, their roots reaching
quite under the house. Instead of a scuttle or a blind blown off in the
gale--a pine tree snapped off or torn up by the roots behind your
house for fuel. Instead of no path to the front-yard gate in the Great
Snow--no gate--no front-yard--and no path to the civilized world.

Solitude

This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and
imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty
in Nature, a part of herself. As I walk along the stony shore of the
pond in my shirt-sleeves, though it is cool as well as cloudy and windy,
and I see nothing special to attract me, all the elements are unusually
congenial to me. The bullfrogs trump to usher in the night, and the note
of the whip-poor-will is borne on the rippling wind from over the water.
Sympathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost takes away
my breath; yet, like the lake, my serenity is rippled but not ruffled.
These small waves raised by the evening wind are as remote from storm
as the smooth reflecting surface. Though it is now dark, the wind still
blows and roars in the wood, the waves still dash, and some creatures
lull the rest with their