Visitors

I think that I love society as much as most, and am ready enough

to fasten myself like a bloodsucker for the time to any full-blooded

man that comes in my way. I am naturally no hermit, but might

possibly sit out the sturdiest frequenter of the bar-room, if my

business called me thither.

I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for

friendship, three for society. When visitors came in larger and

unexpected numbers there was but the third chair for them all, but

they generally economized the room by standing up. It is surprising

how many great men and women a small house will contain. I have had

twenty-five or thirty souls, with their bodies, at once under my

roof, and yet we often parted without being aware that we had come

very near to one another. Many of our houses, both public and

private, with their almost innumerable apartments, their huge halls

and their cellars for the storage of wines and other munitions of

peace, appear to be extravagantly large for their inhabitants. They

are so vast and magnificent that the latter seem to be only vermin

which infest them. I am surprised when the herald blows his summons

before some Tremont or Astor or Middlesex House, to see come

creeping out over the piazza for all inhabitants a ridiculous mouse,

which soon again slinks into some hole in the pavement.

One inconvenience I sometimes experienced in so small a house,

the difficulty of getting to a sufficient distance from my guest

when we began to utter the big thoughts in big words. You want room

for your thoughts to get into sailing trim and run a course or two

before they make their port. The bullet of your thought must have

overcome its lateral and ricochet motion and fallen into its last

and steady course before it reaches the ear of the hearer, else it

may plow out again through the side of his head. Also, our

sentences wanted room to unfold and form their columns in the

interval. Individuals, like nations, must have suitable broad and

natural boundaries, even a considerable neutral ground, between

them. I have found it a singular luxury to talk across the pond to

a companion on the opposite side. In my house we were so near that

we could not begin to hear -- we could not speak low enough to be

heard; as when you throw two stones into calm water so near that

they break each others undulations. If we are merely loquacious

and loud talkers, then we can afford to stand very near together,

cheek by jowl, and feel each others breath; but if we speak

reservedly and thoughtfully, we want to be farther apart, that all

animal heat and moisture may have a chance to evaporate. If we

would enjoy the most intimate society with that in each of us which

is without, or above, being spoken to, we must not only be silent,

but commonly so far apart bodily that we cannot possibly hear each

others voice in any case. Referred to this standard, speech is for

the convenience of those who are hard of hearing; but there are many

fine things which we cannot say if we have to shout. As the

conversation began to assume a loftier and grander tone, we

gradually shoved our chairs farther apart till they touched the wall

in opposite corners, and then commonly there was not room enough.

My "best" room, however, my withdrawing room, always ready for

company, on whose carpet the sun rarely fell, was the pine wood

behind my house. Thither in summer days, when distinguished guests

came, I took them, and a priceless domestic swept the floor and

dusted the furniture and kept the things in order.

If one guest came he sometimes partook of my frugal meal, and it

was no interruption to conversation to be stirring a hasty-pudding,

or watching the rising and maturing of a loaf of bread in the ashes,

in the meanwhile. But if twenty came and sat in my house there was

nothing said about dinner, though there might be bread enough for

two, more than if eating were a forsaken habit; but we naturally

practised abstinence; and this was never felt to be an offence

against hospitality, but the most proper and considerate course.

The waste and decay of physical life, which so often needs repair,

seemed miraculously retarded in such a case, and the vital vigor

stood its ground. I could entertain thus a thousand as well as

twenty; and if any ever went away disappointed or hungry from my

house when they found me at home, they may depend upon it that I

sympathized with them at least. So easy is it, though many

housekeepers doubt it, to establish new and better customs in the

place of the old. You need not rest your reputation on the dinners

you give. For my own part, I was never so effectually deterred from

frequenting a mans house, by any kind of Cerberus whatever, as by

the parade one made about dining me, which I took to be a very

polite and roundabout hint never to trouble him so again. I think I

shall never revisit those scenes. I should be proud to have for the

motto of my cabin those lines of Spenser which one of my visitors

inscribed on a yellow walnut leaf for a card:--

"Arrived there, the little house they fill,

Ne looke for entertainment where none was;

Rest is their feast, and all things at their will:

The noblest mind the best contentment has."

When Winslow, afterward governor of the Plymouth Colony, went

with a companion on a visit of ceremony to Massasoit on foot through

the woods, and arrived tired and hungry at his lodge, they were well

received by the king, but nothing was said about eating that day.

When the night arrived, to quote their own words -- "He laid us on

the bed with himself and his wife, they at the one end and we at the

other, it being only planks laid a foot from the ground and a thin

mat upon them. Two more of his chief men, for want of room, pressed

by and upon us; so that we were worse weary of our lodging than of

our journey." At one oclock the next day Massasoit "brought two

fishes that he had shot," about thrice as big as a bream. "These

being boiled, there were at least forty looked for a share in them;

the most eat of them. This meal only we had in two nights and a

day; and had not one of us bought a partridge, we had taken our

journey fasting." Fearing that they would be light-headed for want

of food and also sleep, owing to "the savages barbarous singing,

(for they use to sing themselves asleep,)" and that they might get

home while they had strength to travel, they departed. As for

lodging, it is true they were but poorly entertained, though what

they found an inconvenience was no doubt intended for an honor; but

as far as eating was concerned, I do not see how the Indians could

have done better. They had nothing to eat themselves, and they were

wiser than to think that apologies could supply the place of food to

their guests; so they drew their belts tighter and said nothing

about it. Another time when Winslow visited them, it being a season

of plenty with them, there was no deficiency in this respect.

As for men, they will hardly fail one anywhere. I had more

visitors while I lived in the woods than at any other period in my

life; I mean that I had some. I met several there under more

favorable circumstances than I could anywhere else. But fewer came

to see me on trivial business. In this respect, my company was

winnowed by my mere distance from town. I had withdrawn so far

within the great ocean of solitude, into which the rivers of society

empty, that for the most part, so far as my needs were concerned,

only the finest sediment was deposited around me. Beside, there

were wafted to me evidences of unexplored and uncultivated

continents on the other side.

Who should come to my lodge this morning but a true Homeric or

Paphlagonian man -- he had so suitable and poetic a name that I am

sorry I cannot print it here -- a Canadian, a woodchopper and

post-maker, who can hole fifty posts in a day, who made his last

supper on a woodchuck which his dog caught. He, too, has heard of

Homer, and, "if it were not for books," would "not know what to do

rainy days," though perhaps he has not read one wholly through for

many rainy seasons. Some priest who could pronounce the Greek

itself taught him to read his verse in the Testament in his native

parish far away; and now I must translate to him, while he holds the

book, Achilles reproof to Patroclus for his sad countenance. --

"Why are you in tears, Patroclus, like a young girl?"

"Or have you alone heard some news from Phthia?

They say that Menoetius lives yet, son of Actor,

And Peleus lives, son of AEacus, among the Myrmidons,

Either of whom having died, we should greatly grieve."

He says, "Thats good." He has a great bundle of white oak bark

under his arm for a sick man, gathered this Sunday morning. "I

suppose theres no harm in going after such a thing to-day," says

he. To him Homer was a great writer, though what his writing was

about he did not know. A more simple and natural man it would be

hard to find. Vice and disease, which cast such a sombre moral hue

over the world, seemed to have hardly any existance for him. He was

about twenty-eight years old, and had left Canada and his fathers

house a dozen years before to work in the States, and earn money to

buy a farm with at last, perhaps in his native country. He was cast

in the coarsest mould; a stout but sluggish body, yet gracefully

carried, with a thick sunburnt neck, dark bushy hair, and dull

sleepy blue eyes, which were occasionally lit up with expression.

He wore a flat gray cloth cap, a dingy wool-colored greatcoat, and

cowhide boots. He was a great consumer of meat, usually carrying

his dinner to his work a couple of miles past my house -- for he

chopped all summer -- in a tin pail; cold meats, often cold

woodchucks, and coffee in a stone bottle which dangled by a string

from his belt; and sometimes he offered me a drink. He came along

early, crossing my bean-field, though without anxiety or haste to

get to his work, such as Yankees exhibit. He wasnt a-going to hurt

himself. He didnt care if he only earned his board. Frequently he

would leave his dinner in the bushes, when his dog had caught a

woodchuck by the way, and go back a mile and a half to dress it and

leave it in the cellar of the house where he boarded, after

deliberating first for half an hour whether he could not sink it in

the pond safely till nightfall -- loving to dwell long upon these

themes. He would say, as he went by in the morning, "How thick the

pigeons are! If working every day were not my trade, I could get

all the meat I should want by hunting-pigeons, woodchucks, rabbits,

partridges -- by gosh! I could get all I should want for a week in

one day."

He was a skilful chopper, and indulged in some flourishes and

ornaments in his art. He cut his trees level and close to the

ground, that the sprouts which came up afterward might be more

vigorous and a sled might slide over the stumps; and instead of

leaving a whole tree to support his corded wood, he would pare it

away to a slender stake or splinter which you could break off with

your hand at last.

He interested me because he was so quiet and solitary and so

happy withal; a well of good humor and contentment which overflowed

at his eyes. His mirth was without alloy. Sometimes I saw him at

his work in the woods, felling trees, and he would greet me with a

laugh of inexpressible satisfaction, and a salutation in Canadian

French, though he spoke English as well. When I approached him he

would suspend his work, and with half-suppressed mirth lie along the

trunk of a pine which he had felled, and, peeling off the inner

bark, roll it up into a ball and chew it while he laughed and

talked. Such an exuberance of animal spirits had he that he

sometimes tumbled down and rolled on the ground with laughter at

anything which made him think and tickled him. Looking round upon

the trees he would exclaim -- "By George! I can enjoy myself well

enough here chopping; I want no better sport." Sometimes, when at

leisure, he amused himself all day in the woods with a pocket

pistol, firing salutes to himself at regular intervals as he walked.

In the winter he had a fire by which at noon he warmed his coffee in

a kettle; and as he sat on a log to eat his dinner the chickadees

would sometimes come round and alight on his arm and peck at the

potato in his fingers; and he said that he "liked to have the little

fellers about him."

In him the animal man chiefly was developed. In physical

endurance and contentment he was cousin to the pine and the rock. I

asked him once if he was not sometimes tired at night, after working

all day; and he answered, with a sincere and serious look,

"Gorrappit, I never was tired in my life." But the intellectual and

what is called spiritual man in him were slumbering as in an infant.

He had been instructed only in that innocent and ineffectual way in

which the Catholic priests teach the aborigines, by which the pupil

is never educated to the degree of consciousness, but only to the

degree of trust and reverence, and a child is not made a man, but

kept a child. When Nature made him, she gave him a strong body and

contentment for his portion, and propped him on every side with

reverence and reliance, that he might live out his threescore years

and ten a child. He was so genuine and unsophisticated that no

introduction would serve to introduce him, more than if you

introduced a woodchuck to your neighbor. He had got to find him out

as you did. He would not play any part. Men paid him wages for

work, and so helped to feed and clothe him; but he never exchanged

opinions with them. He was so simply and naturally humble -- if he

can be called humble who never aspires -- that humility was no

distinct quality in him, nor could he conceive of it. Wiser men

were demigods to him. If you told him that such a one was coming,

he did as if he thought that anything so grand would expect nothing

of himself, but take all the responsibility on itself, and let him

be forgotten still. He never heard the sound of praise. He

particularly reverenced the writer and the preacher. Their

performances were miracles. When I told him that I wrote

considerably, he thought for a long time that it was merely the

handwriting which I meant, for he could write a remarkably good hand

himself. I sometimes found the name of his native parish handsomely

written in the snow by the highway, with the proper French accent,

and knew that he had passed. I asked him if he ever wished to write

his thoughts. He said that he had read and written letters for

those who could not, but he never tried to write thoughts -- no, he

could not, he could not tell what to put first, it would kill him,

and then there was spelling to be attended to at the same time!

I heard that a distinguished wise man and reformer asked him if

he did not want the world to be changed; but he answered with a

chuckle of surprise in his Canadian accent, not knowing that the

question had ever been entertained before, "No, I like it well

enough." It would have suggested many things to a philosopher to

have dealings with him. To a stranger he appeared to know nothing

of things in general; yet I sometimes saw in him a man whom I had

not seen before, and I did not know whether he was as wise as

Shakespeare or as simply ignorant as a child, whether to suspect him

of a fine poetic consciousness or of stupidity. A townsman told me

that when he met him sauntering through the village in his small

close-fitting cap, and whistling to himself, he reminded him of a

prince in disguise.

His only books were an almanac and an arithmetic, in which last

he was considerably expert. The former was a sort of cyclopaedia to

him, which he supposed to contain an abstract of human knowledge, as

indeed it does to a considerable extent. I loved to sound him on

the various reforms of the day, and he never failed to look at them

in the most simple and practical light. He had never heard of such

things before. Could he do without factories? I asked. He had

worn the home-made Vermont gray, he said, and that was good. Could

he dispense with tea and coffee? Did this country afford any

beverage beside water? He had soaked hemlock leaves in water and

drank it, and thought that was better than water in warm weather.

When I asked him if he could do without money, he showed the

convenience of money in such a way as to suggest and coincide with

the most philosophical accounts of the origin of this institution,

and the very derivation of the word pecunia. If an ox were his

property, and he wished to get needles and thread at the store, he

thought it would be inconvenient and impossible soon to go on

mortgaging some portion of the creature each time to that amount.

He could defend many institutions better than any philosopher,

because, in describing them as they concerned him, he gave the true

reason for their prevalence, and speculation had not suggested to

him any other. At another time, hearing Platos definition of a man

-- a biped without feathers -- and that one exhibited a cock plucked

and called it Platos man, he thought it an important difference

that the knees bent the wrong way. He would sometimes exclaim, "How

I love to talk! By George, I could talk all day!" I asked him

once, when I had not seen him for many months, if he had got a new

idea this summer. "Good Lord" -- said he, "a man that has to work

as I do, if he does not forget the ideas he has had, he will do

well. May be the man you hoe with is inclined to race; then, by

gorry, your mind must be there; you think of weeds." He would

sometimes ask me first on such occasions, if I had made any

improvement. One winter day I asked him if he was always satisfied

with himself, wishing to suggest a substitute within him for the

priest without, and some higher motive for living. "Satisfied!"

said he; "some men are satisfied with one thing, and some with

another. One man, perhaps, if he has got enough, will be satisfied

to sit all day with his back to the fire and his belly to the table,

by George!" Yet I never, by any manoeuvring, could get him to take

the spiritual view of things; the highest that he appeared to

conceive of was a simple expediency, such as you might expect an

animal to appreciate; and this, practically, is true of most men.

If I suggested any improvement in his mode of life, he merely

answered, without expressing any regret, that it was too late. Yet

he thoroughly believed in honesty and the like virtues.

There was a certain positive originality, however slight, to be

detected in him, and I occasionally observed that he was thinking

for himself and expressing his own opinion, a phenomenon so rare

that I would any day walk ten miles to observe it, and it amounted

to the re-origination of many of the institutions of society.

Though he hesitated, and perhaps failed to express himself

distinctly, he always had a presentable thought behind. Yet his

thinking was so primitive and immersed in his animal life, that,

though more promising than a merely learned mans, it rarely ripened

to anything which can be reported. He suggested that there might be

men of genius in the lowest grades of life, however permanently

humble and illiterate, who take their own view always, or do not

pretend to see at all; who are as bottomless even as Walden Pond was

thought to be, though they may be dark and muddy.

Many a traveller came out of his way to see me and the inside of

my house, and, as an excuse for calling, asked for a glass of water.

I told them that I drank at the pond, and pointed thither, offering

to lend them a dipper. Far off as I lived, I was not exempted from

the annual visitation which occurs, methinks, about the first of

April, when everybody is on the move; and I had my share of good

luck, though there were some curious specimens among my visitors.

Half-witted men from the almshouse and elsewhere came to see me; but

I endeavored to make them exercise all the wit they had, and make

their confessions to me; in such cases making wit the theme of our

conversation; and so was compensated. Indeed, I found some of them

to be wiser than the so-called overseers of the poor and selectmen

of the town, and thought it was time that the tables were turned.

With respect to wit, I learned that there was not much difference

between the half and the whole. One day, in particular, an

inoffensive, simple-minded pauper, whom with others I had often seen

used as fencing stuff, standing or sitting on a bushel in the fields

to keep cattle and himself from straying, visited me, and expressed

a wish to live as I did. He told me, with the utmost simplicity and

truth, quite superior, or rather inferior, to anything that is

called humility, that he was "deficient in intellect." These were

his words. The Lord had made him so, yet he supposed the Lord cared

as much for him as for another. "I have always been so," said he,

"from my childhood; I never had much mind; I was not like other

children; I am weak in the head. It was the Lords will, I

suppose." And there he was to prove the truth of his words. He was

a metaphysical puzzle to me. I have rarely met a fellowman on such

promising ground -- it was so simple and sincere and so true all

that he said. And, true enough, in proportion as he appeared to

humble himself was he exalted. I did not know at first but it was

the result of a wise policy. It seemed that from such a basis of

truth and frankness as the poor weak-headed pauper had laid, our

intercourse might go forward to something better than the

intercourse of sages.

I had some guests from those not reckoned commonly among the

towns poor, but who should be; who are among the worlds poor, at

any rate; guests who appeal, not to your hospitality, but to your

hospitalality; who earnestly wish to be helped, and preface their

appeal with the information that they are resolved, for one thing,

never to help themselves. I require of a visitor that he be not

actually starving, though he may have the very best appetite in the

world, however he got it. Objects of charity are not guests. Men

who did not know when their visit had terminated, though I went

about my business again, answering them from greater and greater

remoteness. Men of almost every degree of wit called on me in the

migrating season. Some who had more wits than they knew what to do

with; runaway slaves with plantation manners, who listened from time

to time, like the fox in the fable, as if they heard the hounds

a-baying on their track, and looked at me beseechingly, as much as

to say, --

"O Christian, will you send me back?

One real runaway slave, among the rest, whom I helped to forward

toward the north star. Men of one idea, like a hen with one

chicken, and that a duckling; men of a thousand ideas, and unkempt

heads, like those hens which are made to take charge of a hundred

chickens, all in pursuit of one bug, a score of them lost in every

mornings dew -- and become frizzled and mangy in consequence; men

of ideas instead of legs, a sort of intellectual centipede that made

you crawl all over. One man proposed a book in which visitors

should write their names, as at the White Mountains; but, alas! I

have too good a memory to make that necessary.

I could not but notice some of the peculiarities of my visitors.

Girls and boys and young women generally seemed glad to be in the

woods. They looked in the pond and at the flowers, and improved

their time. Men of business, even farmers, thought only of solitude

and employment, and of the great distance at which I dwelt from

something or other; and though they said that they loved a ramble in

the woods occasionally, it was obvious that they did not. Restless

committed men, whose time was an taken up in getting a living or

keeping it; ministers who spoke of God as if they enjoyed a monopoly

of the subject, who could not bear all kinds of opinions; doctors,

lawyers, uneasy housekeepers who pried into my cupboard and bed when

I was out -- how came Mrs. -- to know that my sheets were not as

clean as hers? -- young men who had ceased to be young, and had

concluded that it was safest to follow the beaten track of the

professions -- all these generally said that it was not possible to

do so much good in my position. Ay! there was the rub. The old and

infirm and the timid, of whatever age or sex, thought most of

sickness, and sudden accident and death; to them life seemed full of

danger -- what danger is there if you dont think of any? -- and

they thought that a prudent man would carefully select the safest

position, where Dr. B. might be on hand at a moments warning. To

them the village was literally a community, a league for mutual

defence, and you would suppose that they would not go

a-huckleberrying without a medicine chest. The amount of it is, if

a man is alive, there is always danger that he may die, though the

danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is

dead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs.

Finally, there were the self-styled reformers, the greatest bores of

all, who thought that I was forever singing,--

This is the house that I built;

This is the man that lives in the house that I built;

but they did not know that the third line was,

These are the folks that worry the man

That lives in the house that I built.

I did not fear the hen-harriers, for I kept no chickens; but I

feared the men-harriers rather.

I had more cheering visitors than the last. Children come

a-berrying, railroad men taking a Sunday morning walk in clean

shirts, fishermen and hunters, poets and philosophers; in short, all

honest pilgrims, who came out to the woods for freedoms sake, and

really left the village behind, I was ready to greet with --

"Welcome, Englishmen! welcome, Englishmen!" for I had had

communication with that race.