f bricks and ashes. The house
being gone, he looked at what there was left. He was soothed by the
sympathy which my mere presence, implied, and showed me, as well as the
darkness permitted, where the well was covered up; which, thank Heaven,
could never be burned; and he groped long about the wall to find the
well-sweep which his father had cut and mounted, feeling for the iron
hook or staple by which a burden had been fastened to the heavy end--all
that he could now cling to--to convince me that it was no common
"rider." I felt it, and still remark it almost daily in my walks, for by
it hangs the history of a family.

Once more, on the left, where are seen the well and lilac bushes by the
wall, in the now open field, lived Nutting and Le Grosse. But to return
toward Lincoln.

Farther in the woods than any of these, where the road approaches
nearest to the pond, Wyman the potter squatted, and furnished his
townsmen with earthenware, and left descendants to succeed him. Neither
were they rich in worldly goods, holding the land by sufferance while
they lived; and there often the sheriff came in vain to collect the
taxes, and "attached a chip," for form's sake, as I have read in his
accounts, there being nothing else that he could lay his hands on. One
day in midsummer, when I was hoeing, a man who was carrying a load
of pottery to market stopped his horse against my field and inquired
concerning Wyman the younger. He had long ago bought a potter's wheel
of him, and wished to know what had become of him. I had read of the
potter's clay and wheel in Scripture, but it had never occurred to me
that the pots we use were not such as had come down unbroken from those
days, or grown on trees like gourds somewhere, and I was pleased to hear
that so fictile an art was ever practiced in my neighborhood.

The last inhabitant of these woods before me was an Irishman, Hugh
Quoil (if I have spelt his name with coil enough), who occupied Wyman's
tenement--Col. Quoil, he was called. Rumor said that he had been a
soldier at Waterloo. If he had lived I should have made him fight his
battles over again. His trade here was that of a ditcher. Napoleon went
to St. Helena; Quoil came to Walden Woods. All I know of him is tragic.
He was a man of manners, like one who had seen the world, and was
capable of more civil speech than you could well attend to. He wore a
greatcoat in midsummer, being affected with the trembling delirium, and
his face