By the middle of April,for I made no haste in my work,but rather made the most of it,my house was framed and ready for the raising.I had already bought the shanty of James Collins,an Irishman who worked on the Fitchburg Railroad,for boards.James Collins'shanty was considered an uncommonly fine one.When I called to see it he was not at home.I walked about the outside,at first unobserved from within,the window was so deep and high.It was of small dimensions,with a peaked cottage roof,and not much else to be seen,the dirt being raised five feet all around as if it were a compost heap.The roof was the soundest part,though a good deal warped and made brittle by the sun.Doorsill there was none,but a perennial passage for the hens under the door-board.Mrs.C.came to the door and asked me to view it from the inside.The hens were driven in by my approach.It was dark,and had a dirt floor for the most part,dank,clammy,and aguish,only here a board and there a board which would not bear removal.She lighted a lamp to show me the inside of the roof and the walls,and also that the board floor extended under the bed,warning me not to step into the cellar,a sort of dust hole two feet deep.In her own words,they were “good boards overhead,good boards all around,and a good window,”-of two whole squares originally,only the cat had passed out that way lately.There was a stove,a bed,and a place to sit,an infant in the house where it was born,a silk parasol,gilt-framed looking-glass,and a patent new coffee-mill nailed to an oak sapling,all told.The bargain was soon concluded,for James had in the meanwhile returned.I to pay four dollars and twenty-five cents tonight,he to vacate at five to-morrow morning,selling to nobody else meanwhile:I to take possession at six.It were well,he said,to be there early,and anticipate certain indistinct but wholly unjust claims on the score of ground rent and fuel.This he assured me was the only encumbrance.At six I passed him and his family on the road.One large bundle held their all,-bed,coffee-mill,looking-glass,hens,-all but the cat;she took to the woods and became a wild cat,and,as I learned afterward,trod in a trap set for woodchucks,and so became a dead cat at last.
I took down this dwelling the same morning,drawing the nails,and removed it to the pond-side by small cartloads,spreading the boards on the grass there to bleach and warp back again in the sun.One early thrush gave me a note or two as I drove along the woodland path.I was informed treacherously by a young Patrick that neighbor Seeley,an Irishman,in the intervals of the carting,transferred the still tolerable,straight,and drivable nails,staples,and spikes to his pocket,and then stood when I came back to pass the time of day,and look freshly up,unconcerned,with spring thoughts,at the devastation;there being a dearth of work,as he said.He was there to represent spectatordom,and help make this seemingly insignificant event one with the removal of the gods of Troy.
I dug my cellar in the side of a hill sloping to the south,where a woodchuck had formerly dug his burrow,down through sumach and blackberry roots,and the lowest stain of vegetation,six feet square by seven deep,to a fine sand where potatoes would not freeze in any winter.The sides were left shelving,and not stoned;but the sun having never shone on them,the sand still keeps its place.It was but two hours'work.I took particular pleasure in this breaking of ground,for in almost all latitudes men dig into the earth for an equable temperature.Under the most splendid house in the city is still to be found the cellar where they store their roots as of old,and long after the superstructure has disappeared posterity remark its dent in the earth.The house is still but a sort of porch at the entrance of a burrow.
At length,in the beginning of May,with the help of some of my acquaintances,rather to improve so good an occasion for neighborliness than from any necessity,I set up the frame of my house.No man was ever more honored in the character of his raisers than I.They are destined,I trust,to assist at the raising of loftier structures one day.I began to occupy my house on the 4th of July,as soon as it was boarded and roofed,for the boards were carefully feather-edged and lapped,so that it was perfectly impervious to rain,but before boarding I laid the foundation of a chimney at one end,bringing two cartloads of stones up the hill from the pond in my arms.I built the chimney after my hoeing in the fall,before a fire became necessary for warmth,doing my cooking in the meanwhile out of doors on the ground,early in the morning:which mode I still think is in some respects more convenient and agreeable than the usual one.When it stormed before my bread was baked,I fixed a few boards over the fire,and sat under them to watch my loaf,and passed some pleasant hours in that way.In those days,when my hands were much employed,I read but little,but the least scraps of paper which lay on the ground,my holder,or tablecloth,afforded me as much entertainment,in fact answered the same purpose as the Iliad.
