in it,
to admit the air at least, get into it when it rained and at night, and
hook down the lid, and so have freedom in his love, and in his soul
be free. This did not appear the worst, nor by any means a despicable
alternative. You could sit up as late as you pleased, and, whenever you
got up, go abroad without any landlord or house-lord dogging you for
rent. Many a man is harassed to death to pay the rent of a larger and
more luxurious box who would not have frozen to death in such a box as
this. I am far from jesting. Economy is a subject which admits of being
treated with levity, but it cannot so be disposed of. A comfortable
house for a rude and hardy race, that lived mostly out of doors, was
once made here almost entirely of such materials as Nature furnished
ready to their hands. Gookin, who was superintendent of the Indians
subject to the Massachusetts Colony, writing in 1674, says, "The best
of their houses are covered very neatly, tight and warm, with barks of
trees, slipped from their bodies at those seasons when the sap is up,
and made into great flakes, with pressure of weighty timber, when they
are green.... The meaner sort are covered with mats which they make of
a kind of bulrush, and are also indifferently tight and warm, but not
so good as the former.... Some I have seen, sixty or a hundred feet
long and thirty feet broad.... I have often lodged in their wigwams, and
found them as warm as the best English houses." He adds that they were
commonly carpeted and lined within with well-wrought embroidered mats,
and were furnished with various utensils. The Indians had advanced so
far as to regulate the effect of the wind by a mat suspended over the
hole in the roof and moved by a string. Such a lodge was in the first
instance constructed in a day or two at most, and taken down and put up
in a few hours; and every family owned one, or its apartment in one.

In the savage state every family owns a shelter as good as the best, and
sufficient for its coarser and simpler wants; but I think that I speak
within bounds when I say that, though the birds of the air have their
nests, and the foxes their holes, and the savages their wigwams, in
modern civilized society not more than one half the families own a
shelter. In the large towns and cities, where civilization especially
prevails, the number of those who own a shelter is a very small fraction
of the whole. The rest pay an annual tax for this outside garment of