ew yet farther into my shell, and
endeavored to keep a bright fire both within my house and within my
breast. My employment out of doors now was to collect the dead wood in
the forest, bringing it in my hands or on my shoulders, or sometimes
trailing a dead pine tree under each arm to my shed. An old forest fence
which had seen its best days was a great haul for me. I sacrificed it
to Vulcan, for it was past serving the god Terminus. How much more
interesting an event is that man's supper who has just been forth in the
snow to hunt, nay, you might say, steal, the fuel to cook it with! His
bread and meat are sweet. There are enough fagots and waste wood of all
kinds in the forests of most of our towns to support many fires, but
which at present warm none, and, some think, hinder the growth of the
young wood. There was also the driftwood of the pond. In the course of
the summer I had discovered a raft of pitch pine logs with the bark on,
pinned together by the Irish when the railroad was built. This I hauled
up partly on the shore. After soaking two years and then lying high six
months it was perfectly sound, though waterlogged past drying. I amused
myself one winter day with sliding this piecemeal across the pond,
nearly half a mile, skating behind with one end of a log fifteen feet
long on my shoulder, and the other on the ice; or I tied several logs
together with a birch withe, and then, with a longer birch or alder
which had a book at the end, dragged them across. Though completely
waterlogged and almost as heavy as lead, they not only burned long, but
made a very hot fire; nay, I thought that they burned better for the
soaking, as if the pitch, being confined by the water, burned longer, as
in a lamp.

Gilpin, in his account of the forest borderers of England, says that
"the encroachments of trespassers, and the houses and fences thus raised
on the borders of the forest," were "considered as great nuisances
by the old forest law, and were severely punished under the name of
purprestures, as tending ad terrorem ferarum--ad nocumentum forestae,
etc.," to the frightening of the game and the detriment of the forest.
But I was interested in the preservation of the venison and the vert
more than the hunters or woodchoppers, and as much as though I had been
the Lord Warden himself; and if any part was burned, though I burned it
myself by accident, I grieved with a grief that lasted longer and was
more inconsolable than that