its yellow sand heap stretched away gleaming in the hazy
atmosphere, and the rails shone in the spring sun, and I heard the lark
and pewee and other birds already come to commence another year with us.
They were pleasant spring days, in which the winter of man's discontent
was thawing as well as the earth, and the life that had lain torpid
began to stretch itself. One day, when my axe had come off and I had cut
a green hickory for a wedge, driving it with a stone, and had placed the
whole to soak in a pond-hole in order to swell the wood, I saw a striped
snake run into the water, and he lay on the bottom, apparently without
inconvenience, as long as I stayed there, or more than a quarter of
an hour; perhaps because he had not yet fairly come out of the torpid
state. It appeared to me that for a like reason men remain in their
present low and primitive condition; but if they should feel the
influence of the spring of springs arousing them, they would of
necessity rise to a higher and more ethereal life. I had previously seen
the snakes in frosty mornings in my path with portions of their bodies
still numb and inflexible, waiting for the sun to thaw them. On the 1st
of April it rained and melted the ice, and in the early part of the day,
which was very foggy, I heard a stray goose groping about over the pond
and cackling as if lost, or like the spirit of the fog.

So I went on for some days cutting and hewing timber, and also studs
and rafters, all with my narrow axe, not having many communicable or
scholar-like thoughts, singing to myself,--

Men say they know many things;
But lo! they have taken wings--
The arts and sciences,
And a thousand appliances;
The wind that blows
Is all that any body knows.

I hewed the main timbers six inches square, most of the studs on two
sides only, and the rafters and floor timbers on one side, leaving
the rest of the bark on, so that they were just as straight and much
stronger than sawed ones. Each stick was carefully mortised or tenoned
by its stump, for I had borrowed other tools by this time. My days in
the woods were not very long ones; yet I usually carried my dinner of
bread and butter, and read the newspaper in which it was wrapped, at
noon, sitting amid the green pine boughs which I had cut off, and to my
bread was imparted some of their fragrance, for my hands were co