at it
was more comfortable. Should not every apartment in which man dwells be
lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows
may play at evening about the rafters? These forms are more agreeable
to the fancy and imagination than fresco paintings or other the most
expensive furniture. I now first began to inhabit my house, I may say,
when I began to use it 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 good
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 satisfaction than usual. My
dwelling was small, and I could hardly entertain an echo in it; but it
seemed larger for being a single apartment and remote from neighbors.
All the attractions of a house were concentrated in one room; it was
kitchen, chamber, parlor, and keeping-room; and whatever satisfaction
parent or child, master or servant, derive from living in a house, I
enjoyed it all. Cato says, the master of a family (patremfamilias) must
have in his rustic villa "cellam oleariam, vinariam, dolia multa, uti
lubeat caritatem expectare, et rei, et virtuti, et gloriae erit," that
is, "an oil and wine cellar, many casks, so that it may be pleasant to
expect hard times; it will be for his advantage, and virtue, and glory."
I had in my cellar a firkin of potatoes, about two quarts of peas with
the weevil in them, and on my shelf a little rice, a jug of molasses,
and of rye and Indian meal a peck each.

I sometimes dream of a larger and more populous house, standing in a
golden age, of enduring materials, and without gingerbread work,
which shall still consist of only one room, a vast, rude, substantial,
primitive hall, without ceiling or plastering, with bare rafters and
purlins supporting a sort of lower heaven over one's head--useful to
keep off rain and snow, where the king and queen posts stand out to
receive your homage, when you have done reverence to the prostrate
Saturn of an older dynasty on stepping over the sill; a cavernous house,
wherein you must reach up a torch upon a pole to see the roof; where
some may live in the fireplace, some in the recess of a window, and some
on settles, some at one end of the hall, some at another, and some aloft
on rafters with the spiders, if they choose; a house which you have got
into when you have opened the outside door, and the ceremony is over;
where the weary travel