Former Inhabitants and Winter Visitors

I weathered some merry snow-storms, and spent some cheerful

winter evenings by my fireside, while the snow whirled wildly

without, and even the hooting of the owl was hushed. For many weeks

I met no one in my walks but those who came occasionally to cut wood

and sled it to the village. The elements, however, abetted me in

making a path through the deepest snow in the woods, for when I had

once gone through the wind blew the oak leaves into my tracks, where

they lodged, and by absorbing the rays of the sun melted the snow,

and so not only made a my bed for my feet, but in the night their

dark line was my guide. For human society I was obliged to conjure

up the former occupants of these woods. Within the memory of many

of my townsmen the road near which my house stands resounded with

the laugh and gossip of inhabitants, and the woods which border it

were notched and dotted here and there with their little gardens and

dwellings, though it was then much more shut in by the forest than

now. In some places, within my own remembrance, the pines would

scrape both sides of a chaise at once, and women and children who

were compelled to go this way to Lincoln alone and on foot did it

with fear, and often ran a good part of the distance. Though mainly

but a humble route to neighboring villages, or for the woodmans

team, it once amused the traveller more than now by its variety, and

lingered longer in his memory. Where now firm open fields stretch

from the village to the woods, it then ran through a maple swamp on

a foundation of logs, the remnants of which, doubtless, still

underlie the present dusty highway, from the Stratton, now the

Alms-House Farm, to Bristers Hill.

East of my bean-field, across the road, lived Cato Ingraham,

slave of Duncan Ingraham, Esquire, gentleman, of Concord village,

who built his slave a house, and gave him permission to live in

Walden Woods; -- Cato, not Uticensis, but Concordiensis. Some say

that he was a Guinea Negro. There are a few who remember his little

patch among the walnuts, which he let grow up till he should be old

and need them; but a younger and whiter speculator got them at last.

He too, however, occupies an equally narrow house at present.

Catos half-obliterated cellar-hole still remains, though known to

few, being concealed from the traveller by a fringe of pines. It is

now filled with the smooth sumach (Rhus glabra), and one of the

earliest species of goldenrod (Solidago stricta) grows there

luxuriantly.

Here, by the very corner of my field, still nearer to town,

Zilpha, a colored woman, had her little house, where she spun linen

for the townsfolk, making the Walden Woods ring with her shrill

singing, for she had a loud and notable voice. At length, in the

war of 1812, her dwelling was set on fire by English soldiers,

prisoners on parole, when she was away, and her cat and dog and hens

were all burned up together. She led a hard life, and somewhat

inhumane. One old frequenter of these woods remembers, that as he

passed her house one noon he heard her muttering to herself over her

gurgling pot -- "Ye are all bones, bones!" I have seen bricks amid

the oak copse there.

Down the road, on the right hand, on Bristers Hill, lived

Brister Freeman, "a handy Negro," slave of Squire Cummings once --

there where grow still the apple trees which Brister planted and

tended; large old trees now, but their fruit still wild and ciderish

to my taste. Not long since I read his epitaph in the old Lincoln

burying-ground, a little on one side, near the unmarked graves of

some British grenadiers who fell in the retreat from Concord --

where he is styled "Sippio Brister" -- Scipio Africanus he had some

title to be called -- "a man of color," as if he were discolored.

It also told me, with staring emphasis, when he died; which was but

an indirect way of informing me that he ever lived. With him dwelt

Fenda, his hospitable wife, who told fortunes, yet pleasantly --

large, round, and black, blacker than any of the children of night,

such a dusky orb as never rose on Concord before or since.

Farther down the hill, on the left, on the old road in the

woods, are marks of some homestead of the Stratton family; whose

orchard once covered all the slope of Bristers Hill, but was long

since killed out by pitch pines, excepting a few stumps, whose old

roots furnish still the wild stocks of many a thrifty village tree.

Nearer yet to town, you come to Breeds location, on the other

side of the way, just on the edge of the wood; ground famous for the

pranks of a demon not distinctly named in old mythology, who has

acted a prominent and astounding part in our New England life, and

deserves, as much as any mythological character, to have his

biography written one day; who first comes in the guise of a friend

or hired man, and then robs and murders the whole family --

New-England Rum. But history must not yet tell the tragedies

enacted here; let time intervene in some measure to assuage and lend

an azure tint to them. Here the most indistinct and dubious

tradition says that once a tavern stood; the well the same, which

tempered the travellers beverage and refreshed his steed. Here

then men saluted one another, and heard and told the news, and went

their ways again.

Breeds hut was standing only a dozen years ago, though it had

long been unoccupied. It was about the size of mine. It was set on

fire by mischievous boys, one Election night, if I do not mistake.

I lived on the edge of the village then, and had just lost myself

over Davenants "Gondibert," that winter that I labored with a

lethargy -- which, by the way, I never knew whether to regard as a

family complaint, having an uncle who goes to sleep shaving himself,

and is obliged to sprout potatoes in a cellar Sundays, in order to

keep awake and keep the Sabbath, or as the consequence of my attempt

to read Chalmers collection of English poetry without skipping. It

fairly overcame my Nervii. I had just sunk my head on this when the

bells rung fire, and in hot haste the engines rolled that way, led

by a straggling troop of men and boys, and I among the foremost, for

I had leaped the brook. We thought it was far south over the woods

-- we who had run to fires before -- barn, shop, or dwelling-house,

or all together. "Its Bakers barn," cried one. "It is the Codman

place," affirmed another. And then fresh sparks went up above the

wood, as if the roof fell in, and we all shouted "Concord to the

rescue!" Wagons shot past with furious speed and crushing loads,

bearing, perchance, among the rest, the agent of the Insurance

Company, who was bound to go however far; and ever and anon the

engine bell tinkled behind, more slow and sure; and rearmost of all,

as it was afterward whispered, came they who set the fire and gave

the alarm. Thus we kept on like true idealists, rejecting the

evidence of our senses, until at a turn in the road we heard the

crackling and actually felt the heat of the fire from over the wall,

and realized, alas! that we were there. The very nearness of the

fire but cooled our ardor. At first we thought to throw a frog-pond

on to it; but concluded to let it burn, it was so far gone and so

worthless. So we stood round our engine, jostled one another,

expressed our sentiments through speaking-trumpets, or in lower tone

referred to the great conflagrations which the world has witnessed,

including Bascoms shop, and, between ourselves, we thought that,

were we there in season with our "tub," and a full frog-pond by, we

could turn that threatened last and universal one into another

flood. We finally retreated without doing any mischief -- returned

to sleep and "Gondibert." But as for "Gondibert," I would except

that passage in the preface about wit being the souls powder --

"but most of mankind are strangers to wit, as Indians are to

powder."

It chanced that I walked that way across the fields the

following night, about the same hour, and hearing a low moaning at

this spot, I drew near in the dark, and discovered the only survivor

of the family that I know, the heir of both its virtues and its

vices, who alone was interested in this burning, lying on his

stomach and looking over the cellar wall at the still smouldering

cinders beneath, muttering to himself, as is his wont. He had been

working far off in the river meadows all day, and had improved the

first moments that he could call his own to visit the home of his

fathers and his youth. He gazed into the cellar from all sides and

points of view by turns, always lying down to it, as if there was

some treasure, which he remembered, concealed between the stones,

where there was absolutely nothing but a heap of 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 forms

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 potters wheel of him, and wished to know what had

become of him. I had read of the potters 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

Wymans 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 was the color of

carmine. He died in the road at the foot of Bristers Hill shortly

after I came to the woods, so that I have not remembered him as a

neighbor. Before his house was pulled down, when his comrades

avoided it as "an unlucky castle," I visited it. There lay his old

clothes curled up by use, as if they were himself, upon his raised

plank bed. His pipe lay broken on the hearth, instead of a bowl

broken at the fountain. The last could never have been the symbol

of his death, for he confessed to me that, though he had heard of

Bristers Spring, he had never seen it; and soiled cards, kings of

diamonds, spades, and hearts, were scattered over the floor. One

black chicken which the administrator could not catch, black as

night and as silent, not even croaking, awaiting Reynard, still went

to roost in the next apartment. In the rear there was the dim

outline of a garden, which had been planted but had never received

its first hoeing, owing to those terrible shaking fits, though it

was now harvest time. It was overrun with Roman wormwood and

beggar-ticks, which last stuck to my clothes for all fruit. The

skin of a woodchuck was freshly stretched upon the back of the

house, a trophy of his last Waterloo; but no warm cap or mittens

would he want more.

Now only a dent in the earth marks the site of these dwellings,

with buried cellar stones, and strawberries, raspberries,

thimble-berries, hazel-bushes, and sumachs growing in the sunny

sward there; some pitch pine or gnarled oak occupies what was the

chimney nook, and a sweet-scented black birch, perhaps, waves where

the door-stone was. Sometimes the well dent is visible, where once

a spring oozed; now dry and tearless grass; or it was covered deep

-- not to be discovered till some late day -- with a flat stone

under the sod, when the last of the race departed. What a sorrowful

act must that be -- the covering up of wells! coincident with the

opening of wells of tears. These cellar dents, like deserted fox

burrows, old holes, are all that is left where once were the stir

and bustle of human life, and "fate, free will, foreknowledge

absolute," in some form and dialect or other were by turns

discussed. But all I can learn of their conclusions amounts to just

this, that "Cato and Brister pulled wool"; which is about as

edifying as the history of more famous schools of philosophy.

Still grows the vivacious lilac a generation after the door and

lintel and the sill are gone, unfolding its sweet-scented flowers

each spring, to be plucked by the musing traveller; planted and

tended once by childrens hands, in front-yard plots -- now standing

by wallsides in retired pastures, and giving place to new-rising

forests; -- the last of that stirp, sole survivor of that family.

Little did the dusky children think that the puny slip with its two

eyes only, which they stuck in the ground in the shadow of the house

and daily watered, would root itself so, and outlive them, and house

itself in the rear that shaded it, and grown mans garden and

orchard, and tell their story faintly to the lone wanderer a

half-century after they had grown up and died -- blossoming as fair,

and smelling as sweet, as in that first spring. I mark its still

tender, civil, cheerful lilac colors.

But this small village, germ of something more, why did it fail

while Concord keeps its ground? Were there no natural advantages --

no water privileges, forsooth? Ay, the deep Walden Pond and cool

Bristers Spring -- privilege to drink long and healthy draughts at

these, all unimproved by these men but to dilute their glass. They

were universally a thirsty race. Might not the basket,

stable-broom, mat-making, corn-parching, linen-spinning, and pottery

business have thrived here, making the wilderness to blossom like

the rose, and a numerous posterity have inherited the land of their

fathers? The sterile soil would at least have been proof against a

low-land degeneracy. Alas! how little does the memory of these

human inhabitants enhance the beauty of the landscape! Again,

perhaps, Nature will try, with me for a first settler, and my house

raised last spring to be the oldest in the hamlet.

I am not aware that any man has ever built on the spot which I

occupy. Deliver me from a city built on the site of a more ancient

city, whose materials are ruins, whose gardens cemeteries. The soil

is blanched and accursed there, and before that becomes necessary

the earth itself will be destroyed. With such reminiscences I

repeopled the woods and lulled myself asleep.

At this season I seldom had a visitor. When the snow lay

deepest no wanderer ventured near my house for a week or fortnight

at a time, but there I lived as snug as a meadow mouse, or as cattle

and poultry which are said to have survived for a long time buried

in drifts, even without food; or like that early settlers family in

the town of Sutton, in this State, whose cottage was completely

covered by the great snow of 1717 when he was absent, and an Indian

found it only by the hole which the chimneys breath made in the

drift, and so relieved the family. But no friendly Indian concerned

himself about me; nor needed he, for the master of the house was at

home. The Great Snow! How cheerful it is to hear of! When the

farmers could not get to the woods and swamps with their teams, and

were obliged to cut down the shade trees before their houses, and,

when the crust was harder, cut off the trees in the swamps, ten feet

from the ground, as it appeared the next spring.

In the deepest snows, the path which I used from the highway to

my house, about half a mile long, might have been represented by a

meandering dotted line, with wide intervals between the dots. For a

week of even weather I took exactly the same number of steps, and of

the same length, coming and going, stepping deliberately and with

the precision of a pair of dividers in my own deep tracks -- to such

routine the winter reduces us -- yet often they were filled with

heavens own blue. But no weather interfered fatally with my walks,

or rather my going abroad, for I frequently tramped eight or ten

miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech

tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines;

when the ice and snow causing their limbs to droop, and so

sharpening their tops, had changed the pines into fir trees; wading

to the tops of the highest hills when the show was nearly two feet

deep on a level, and shaking down another snow-storm on my head at

every step; or sometimes creeping and floundering thither on my

hands and knees, when the hunters had gone into winter quarters.

One afternoon I amused myself by watching a barred owl (Strix

nebulosa) sitting on one of the lower dead limbs of a white pine,

close to the trunk, in broad daylight, I standing within a rod of

him. He could hear me when I moved and cronched the snow with my

feet, but could not plainly see me. When I made most noise he would

stretch out his neck, and erect his neck feathers, and open his eyes

wide; but their lids soon fell again, and he began to nod. I too

felt a slumberous influence after watching him half an hour, as he

sat thus with his eyes half open, like a cat, winged brother of the

cat. There was only a narrow slit left between their lids, by which

be preserved a pennisular relation to me; thus, with half-shut eyes,

looking out from the land of dreams, and endeavoring to realize me,

vague object or mote that interrupted his visions. At length, on

some louder noise or my nearer approach, he would grow uneasy and

sluggishly turn about on his perch, as if impatient at having his

dreams disturbed; and when he launched himself off and flapped

through the pines, spreading his wings to unexpected breadth, I

could not hear the slightest sound from them. Thus, guided amid the

pine boughs rather by a delicate sense of their neighborhood than by

sight, feeling his twilight way, as it were, with his sensitive

pinions, he found a new perch, where he might in peace await the

dawning of his day.

As I walked over the long causeway made for the railroad through

the meadows, I encountered many a blustering and nipping wind, for

nowhere has it freer play; and when the frost had smitten me on one

cheek, heathen as I was, I turned to it the other also. Nor was it

much better by the carriage road from Bristers Hill. For I came to

town still, like a friendly Indian, when the contents of the broad

open fields were all piled up between the walls of the Walden road,

and half an hour sufficed to obliterate the tracks of the last

traveller. And when I returned new drifts would have formed,

through which I floundered, where the busy northwest wind had been

depositing the powdery snow round a sharp angle in the road, and not

a rabbits track, nor even the fine print, the small type, of a

meadow mouse was to be seen. Yet I rarely failed to find, even in

midwinter, some warm and springly swamp where the grass and the

skunk-cabbage still put forth with perennial verdure, and some

hardier bird occasionally awaited the return of spring.

Sometimes, notwithstanding the snow, when I returned from my

walk at evening I crossed the deep tracks of a woodchopper leading

from my door, and found his pile of whittlings on the hearth, and my

house filled with the odor of his pipe. Or on a Sunday afternoon,

if I chanced to be at home, I heard the cronching of the snow made

by the step of a long-headed farmer, who from far through the woods

sought my house, to have a social "crack"; one of the few of his

vocation who are "men on their farms"; who donned a frock instead of

a professors gown, and is as ready to extract the moral out of

church or state as to haul a load of manure from his barn-yard. We

talked of rude and simple times, when men sat about large fires in

cold, bracing weather, with clear heads; and when other dessert

failed, we tried our teeth on many a nut which wise squirrels have

long since abandoned, for those which have the thickest shells are

commonly empty.

The one who came from farthest to my lodge, through deepest

snows and most dismal tempests, was a poet. A farmer, a hunter, a

soldier, a reporter, even a philosopher, may be daunted; but nothing

can deter a poet, for he is actuated by pure love. Who can predict

his comings and goings? His business calls him out at all hours,

even when doctors sleep. We made that small house ring with

boisterous mirth and resound with the murmur of much sober talk,

making amends then to Walden vale for the long silences. Broadway

was still and deserted in comparison. At suitable intervals there

were regular salutes of laughter, which might have been referred

indifferently to the last-uttered or the forth-coming jest. We made

many a "bran new" theory of life over a thin dish of gruel, which

combined the advantages of conviviality with the clear-headedness

which philosophy requires.

I should not forget that during my last winter at the pond there

was another welcome visitor, who at one time came through the

village, through snow and rain and darkness, till he saw my lamp

through the trees, and shared with me some long winter evenings.

One of the last of the philosophers -- Connecticut gave him to the

world -- he peddled first her wares, afterwards, as he declares, his

brains. These he peddles still, prompting God and disgracing man,

bearing for fruit his brain only, like the nut its kernel. I think

that he must be the man of the most faith of any alive. His words

and attitude always suppose a better state of things than other men

are acquainted with, and he will be the last man to be disappointed

as the ages revolve. He has no venture in the present. But though

comparatively disregarded now, when his day comes, laws unsuspected

by most will take effect, and masters of families and rulers will

come to him for advice.

"How blind that cannot see serenity!"

A true friend of man; almost the only friend of human progress. An

Old Mortality, say rather an Immortality, with unwearied patience

and faith making plain the image engraven in mens bodies, the God

of whom they are but defaced and leaning monuments. With his

hospitable intellect he embraces children, beggars, insane, and

scholars, and entertains the thought of all, adding to it commonly

some breadth and elegance. I think that he should keep a

caravansary on the worlds highway, where philosophers of all

nations might put up, and on his sign should be printed,

"Entertainment for man, but not for his beast. Enter ye that have

leisure and a quiet mind, who earnestly seek the right road." He is

perhaps the sanest man and has the fewest crotchets of any I chance

to know; the same yesterday and tomorrow. Of yore we had sauntered

and talked, and effectually put the world behind us; for he was

pledged to no institution in it, freeborn, ingenuus. Whichever way

we turned, it seemed that the heavens and the earth had met

together, since he enhanced the beauty of the landscape. A

blue-robed man, whose fittest roof is the overarching sky which

reflects his serenity. I do not see how he can ever die; Nature

cannot spare him.

Having each some shingles of thought well dried, we sat and

whittled them, trying our knives, and admiring the clear yellowish

grain of the pumpkin pine. We waded so gently and reverently, or we

pulled together so smoothly, that the fishes of thought were not

scared from the stream, nor feared any angler on the bank, but came

and went grandly, like the clouds which float through the western

sky, and the mother-o-pearl flocks which sometimes form and

dissolve there. There we worked, revising mythology, rounding a

fable here and there, and building castles in the air for which

earth offered no worthy foundation. Great Looker! Great Expecter!

to converse with whom was a New England Nights Entertainment. Ah!

such discourse we had, hermit and philosopher, and the old settler I

have spoken of -- we three -- it expanded and racked my little

house; I should not dare to say how many pounds weight there was

above the atmospheric pressure on every circular inch; it opened its

seams so that they had to be calked with much dulness thereafter to

stop the consequent leak; -- but I had enough of that kind of oakum

already picked.

There was one other with whom I had "solid seasons," long to be

remembered, at his house in the village, and who looked in upon me

from time to time; but I had no more for society there.

There too, as everywhere, I sometimes expected the Visitor who

never comes. The Vishnu Purana says, "The house-holder is to remain

at eventide in his courtyard as long as it takes to milk a cow, or

longer if he pleases, to await the arrival of a guest." I often

performed this duty of hospitality, waited long enough to milk a

whole herd of cows, but did not see the man approaching from the

town.