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<h2> Sounds </h2>
<p>But while we are confined to books, though the most select and classic,
and read only particular written languages, which are themselves but
dialects and provincial, we are in danger of forgetting the language which
all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is copious and
standard. Much is published, but little printed. The rays which stream
through the shutter will be no longer remembered when the shutter is
wholly removed. No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of
being forever on the alert. What is a course of history or philosophy, or
poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most
admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always
at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer?
Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity.</p>
<p>I did not read books the first summer; I hoed beans. Nay, I often did
better than this. There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice
the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands.
I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having
taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till
noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in
undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sing around or flitted
noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west
window, or the noise of some traveller's wagon on the distant highway, I
was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in
the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have
been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and
above my usual allowance. I realized what the Orientals mean by
contemplation and the forsaking of works. For the most part, I minded not
how the hours went. The day advanced as if to light some work of mine; it
was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing memorable is
accomplished. Instead of singing like the birds, I silently smiled at my
incessant good fortune. As the sparrow had its trill, sitting on the
hickory before my door, so had I my chuckle or suppressed warble which he
might hear out of my nest. My days were not days of the week, bearing the
stamp of any heathen deity, nor were they minced into hours and fretted by
the ticking of a clock; for I lived like the Puri Indians, of whom it is
said that "for yesterday, today, and tomorrow they have only one word, and
they express the variety of meaning by pointing backward for yesterday
forward for tomorrow, and overhead for the passing day." This was sheer
idleness to my fellow-townsmen, no doubt; but if the birds and flowers had
tried me by their standard, I should not have been found wanting. A man
must find his occasions in himself, it is true. The natural day is very
calm, and will hardly reprove his indolence.</p>
<p>I had this advantage, at least, in my mode of life, over those who were
obliged to look abroad for amusement, to society and the theatre, that my
life itself was become my amusement and never ceased to be novel. It was a
drama of many scenes and without an end. If we were always, indeed,
getting our living, and regulating our lives according to the last and
best mode we had learned, we should never be troubled with ennui. Follow
your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh
prospect every hour. Housework was a pleasant pastime. When my floor was
dirty, I rose early, and, setting all my furniture out of doors on the
grass, bed and bedstead making but one budget, dashed water on the floor,
and sprinkled white sand from the pond on it, and then with a broom
scrubbed it clean and white; and by the time the villagers had broken
their fast the morning sun had dried my house sufficiently to allow me to
move in again, and my meditations were almost uninterupted. It was
pleasant to see my whole household effects out on the grass, making a
little pile like a gypsy's pack, and my three-legged table, from which I
did not remove the books and pen and ink, standing amid the pines and
hickories. They seemed glad to get out themselves, and as if unwilling to
be brought in. I was sometimes tempted to stretch an awning over them and
take my seat there. It was worth the while to see the sun shine on these
things, and hear the free wind blow on them; so much more interesting most
familiar objects look out of doors than in the house. A bird sits on the
next bough, life-everlasting grows under the table, and blackberry vines
run round its legs; pine cones, chestnut burs, and strawberry leaves are
strewn about. It looked as if this was the way these forms came to be
transferred to our furniture, to tables, chairs, and bedsteads—because
they once stood in their midst.</p>
<p>My house was on the side of a hill, immediately on the edge of the larger
wood, in the midst of a young forest of pitch pines and hickories, and
half a dozen rods from the pond, to which a narrow footpath led down the
hill. In my front yard grew the strawberry, blackberry, and
life-everlasting, johnswort and goldenrod, shrub oaks and sand cherry,
blueberry and groundnut. Near the end of May, the sand cherry (<i>Cerasus
pumila</i>) adorned the sides of the path with its delicate flowers
arranged in umbels cylindrically about its short stems, which last, in the
fall, weighed down with good-sized and handsome cherries, fell over in
wreaths like rays on every side. I tasted them out of compliment to
Nature, though they were scarcely palatable. The sumach (<i>Rhus glabra</i>)
grew luxuriantly about the house, pushing up through the embankment which
I had made, and growing five or six feet the first season. Its broad
pinnate tropical leaf was pleasant though strange to look on. The large
buds, suddenly pushing out late in the spring from dry sticks which had
seemed to be dead, developed themselves as by magic into graceful green
and tender boughs, an inch in diameter; and sometimes, as I sat at my
window, so heedlessly did they grow and tax their weak joints, I heard a
fresh and tender bough suddenly fall like a fan to the ground, when there
was not a breath of air stirring, broken off by its own weight. In August,
the large masses of berries, which, when in flower, had attracted many
wild bees, gradually assumed their bright velvety crimson hue, and by
their weight again bent down and broke the tender limbs.</p>
<p><br/></p>
<p>As I sit at my window this summer afternoon, hawks are circling about my
clearing; the tantivy of wild pigeons, flying by two and threes athwart my
view, or perching restless on the white pine boughs behind my house, gives
a voice to the air; a fish hawk dimples the glassy surface of the pond and
brings up a fish; a mink steals out of the marsh before my door and seizes
a frog by the shore; the sedge is bending under the weight of the
reed-birds flitting hither and thither; and for the last half-hour I have
heard the rattle of railroad cars, now dying away and then reviving like
the beat of a partridge, conveying travellers from Boston to the country.
For I did not live so out of the world as that boy who, as I hear, was put
out to a farmer in the east part of the town, but ere long ran away and
came home again, quite down at the heel and homesick. He had never seen
such a dull and out-of-the-way place; the folks were all gone off; why,
you couldn't even hear the whistle! I doubt if there is such a place in
Massachusetts now:—</p>
<p>"In truth, our village has become a butt<br/>
For one of those fleet railroad shafts, and o'er<br/>
Our peaceful plain its soothing sound is—Concord."<br/></p>
<p class="nind">
The Fitchburg Railroad touches the pond about a hundred rods south of
where I dwell. I usually go to the village along its causeway, and am, as
it were, related to society by this link. The men on the freight trains,
who go over the whole length of the road, bow to me as to an old
acquaintance, they pass me so often, and apparently they take me for an
employee; and so I am. I too would fain be a track-repairer somewhere in
the orbit of the earth.</p>
<p>The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods summer and winter,
sounding like the scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer's yard,
informing me that many restless city merchants are arriving within the
circle of the town, or adventurous country traders from the other side. As
they come under one horizon, they shout their warning to get off the track
to the other, heard sometimes through the circles of two towns. Here come
your groceries, country; your rations, countrymen! Nor is there any man so
independent on his farm that he can say them nay. And here's your pay for
them! screams the countryman's whistle; timber like long battering-rams
going twenty miles an hour against the city's walls, and chairs enough to
seat all the weary and heavy-laden that dwell within them. With such huge
and lumbering civility the country hands a chair to the city. All the
Indian huckleberry hills are stripped, all the cranberry meadows are raked
into the city. Up comes the cotton, down goes the woven cloth; up comes
the silk, down goes the woollen; up come the books, but down goes the wit
that writes them.</p>
<p>When I meet the engine with its train of cars moving off with planetary
motion—or, rather, like a comet, for the beholder knows not if with
that velocity and with that direction it will ever revisit this system,
since its orbit does not look like a returning curve—with its steam
cloud like a banner streaming behind in golden and silver wreaths, like
many a downy cloud which I have seen, high in the heavens, unfolding its
masses to the light—as if this traveling demigod, this
cloud-compeller, would ere long take the sunset sky for the livery of his
train; when I hear the iron horse make the hills echo with his snort like
thunder, shaking the earth with his feet, and breathing fire and smoke
from his nostrils (what kind of winged horse or fiery dragon they will put
into the new Mythology I don't know), it seems as if the earth had got a
race now worthy to inhabit it. If all were as it seems, and men made the
elements their servants for noble ends! If the cloud that hangs over the
engine were the perspiration of heroic deeds, or as beneficent as that
which floats over the farmer's fields, then the elements and Nature
herself would cheerfully accompany men on their errands and be their
escort.</p>
<p>I watch the passage of the morning cars with the same feeling that I do
the rising of the sun, which is hardly more regular. Their train of clouds
stretching far behind and rising higher and higher, going to heaven while
the cars are going to Boston, conceals the sun for a minute and casts my
distant field into the shade, a celestial train beside which the petty
train of cars which hugs the earth is but the barb of the spear. The
stabler of the iron horse was up early this winter morning by the light of
the stars amid the mountains, to fodder and harness his steed. Fire, too,
was awakened thus early to put the vital heat in him and get him off. If
the enterprise were as innocent as it is early! If the snow lies deep,
they strap on his snowshoes, and, with the giant plow, plow a furrow from
the mountains to the seaboard, in which the cars, like a following
drill-barrow, sprinkle all the restless men and floating merchandise in
the country for seed. All day the fire-steed flies over the country,
stopping only that his master may rest, and I am awakened by his tramp and
defiant snort at midnight, when in some remote glen in the woods he fronts
the elements incased in ice and snow; and he will reach his stall only
with the morning star, to start once more on his travels without rest or
slumber. Or perchance, at evening, I hear him in his stable blowing off
the superfluous energy of the day, that he may calm his nerves and cool
his liver and brain for a few hours of iron slumber. If the enterprise
were as heroic and commanding as it is protracted and unwearied!</p>
<p>Far through unfrequented woods on the confines of towns, where once only
the hunter penetrated by day, in the darkest night dart these bright
saloons without the knowledge of their inhabitants; this moment stopping
at some brilliant station-house in town or city, where a social crowd is
gathered, the next in the Dismal Swamp, scaring the owl and fox. The
startings and arrivals of the cars are now the epochs in the village day.
They go and come with such regularity and precision, and their whistle can
be heard so far, that the farmers set their clocks by them, and thus one
well-conducted institution regulates a whole country. Have not men
improved somewhat in punctuality since the railroad was invented? Do they
not talk and think faster in the depot than they did in the stage-office?
There is something electrifying in the atmosphere of the former place. I
have been astonished at the miracles it has wrought; that some of my
neighbors, who, I should have prophesied, once for all, would never get to
Boston by so prompt a conveyance, are on hand when the bell rings. To do
things "railroad fashion" is now the byword; and it is worth the while to
be warned so often and so sincerely by any power to get off its track.
There is no stopping to read the riot act, no firing over the heads of the
mob, in this case. We have constructed a fate, an <i>Atropos</i>, that
never turns aside. (Let that be the name of your engine.) Men are
advertised that at a certain hour and minute these bolts will be shot
toward particular points of the compass; yet it interferes with no man's
business, and the children go to school on the other track. We live the
steadier for it. We are all educated thus to be sons of Tell. The air is
full of invisible bolts. Every path but your own is the path of fate. Keep
on your own track, then.</p>
<p>What recommends commerce to me is its enterprise and bravery. It does not
clasp its hands and pray to Jupiter. I see these men every day go about
their business with more or less courage and content, doing more even than
they suspect, and perchance better employed than they could have
consciously devised. I am less affected by their heroism who stood up for
half an hour in the front line at Buena Vista, than by the steady and
cheerful valor of the men who inhabit the snowplow for their winter
quarters; who have not merely the three-o'-clock-in-the-morning courage,
which Bonaparte thought was the rarest, but whose courage does not go to
rest so early, who go to sleep only when the storm sleeps or the sinews of
their iron steed are frozen. On this morning of the Great Snow, perchance,
which is still raging and chilling men's blood, I bear the muffled tone of
their engine bell from out the fog bank of their chilled breath, which
announces that the cars <i>are coming</i>, without long delay,
notwithstanding the veto of a New England northeast snow-storm, and I
behold the plowmen covered with snow and rime, their heads peering, above
the mould-board which is turning down other than daisies and the nests of
field mice, like bowlders of the Sierra Nevada, that occupy an outside
place in the universe.</p>
<p>Commerce is unexpectedly confident and serene, alert, adventurous, and
unwearied. It is very natural in its methods withal, far more so than many
fantastic enterprises and sentimental experiments, and hence its singular
success. I am refreshed and expanded when the freight train rattles past
me, and I smell the stores which go dispensing their odors all the way
from Long Wharf to Lake Champlain, reminding me of foreign parts, of coral
reefs, and Indian oceans, and tropical climes, and the extent of the
globe. I feel more like a citizen of the world at the sight of the
palm-leaf which will cover so many flaxen New England heads the next
summer, the Manilla hemp and cocoanut husks, the old junk, gunny bags,
scrap iron, and rusty nails. This carload of torn sails is more legible
and interesting now than if they should be wrought into paper and printed
books. Who can write so graphically the history of the storms they have
weathered as these rents have done? They are proof-sheets which need no
correction. Here goes lumber from the Maine woods, which did not go out to
sea in the last freshet, risen four dollars on the thousand because of
what did go out or was split up; pine, spruce, cedar—first, second,
third, and fourth qualities, so lately all of one quality, to wave over
the bear, and moose, and caribou. Next rolls Thomaston lime, a prime lot,
which will get far among the hills before it gets slacked. These rags in
bales, of all hues and qualities, the lowest condition to which cotton and
linen descend, the final result of dress—of patterns which are now
no longer cried up, unless it be in Milwaukee, as those splendid articles,
English, French, or American prints, ginghams, muslins, etc., gathered
from all quarters both of fashion and poverty, going to become paper of
one color or a few shades only, on which, forsooth, will be written tales
of real life, high and low, and founded on fact! This closed car smells of
salt fish, the strong New England and commercial scent, reminding me of
the Grand Banks and the fisheries. Who has not seen a salt fish,
thoroughly cured for this world, so that nothing can spoil it, and putting
the perseverance of the saints to the blush? with which you may sweep or
pave the streets, and split your kindlings, and the teamster shelter
himself and his lading against sun, wind, and rain behind it—and the
trader, as a Concord trader once did, hang it up by his door for a sign
when he commences business, until at last his oldest customer cannot tell
surely whether it be animal, vegetable, or mineral, and yet it shall be as
pure as a snowflake, and if it be put into a pot and boiled, will come out
an excellent dun-fish for a Saturday's dinner. Next Spanish hides, with
the tails still preserving their twist and the angle of elevation they had
when the oxen that wore them were careering over the pampas of the Spanish
Main—a type of all obstinacy, and evincing how almost hopeless and
incurable are all constitutional vices. I confess, that practically
speaking, when I have learned a man's real disposition, I have no hopes of
changing it for the better or worse in this state of existence. As the
Orientals say, "A cur's tail may be warmed, and pressed, and bound round
with ligatures, and after a twelve years' labor bestowed upon it, still it
will retain its natural form." The only effectual cure for such
inveteracies as these tails exhibit is to make glue of them, which I
believe is what is usually done with them, and then they will stay put and
stick. Here is a hogshead of molasses or of brandy directed to John Smith,
Cuttingsville, Vermont, some trader among the Green Mountains, who imports
for the farmers near his clearing, and now perchance stands over his
bulkhead and thinks of the last arrivals on the coast, how they may affect
the price for him, telling his customers this moment, as he has told them
twenty times before this morning, that he expects some by the next train
of prime quality. It is advertised in the Cuttingsville Times.</p>
<p>While these things go up other things come down. Warned by the whizzing
sound, I look up from my book and see some tall pine, hewn on far northern
hills, which has winged its way over the Green Mountains and the
Connecticut, shot like an arrow through the township within ten minutes,
and scarce another eye beholds it; going</p>
<p>"to be the mast<br/>
Of some great ammiral."<br/></p>
<p class="nind">
And hark! here comes the cattle-train bearing the cattle of a thousand
hills, sheepcots, stables, and cow-yards in the air, drovers with their
sticks, and shepherd boys in the midst of their flocks, all but the
mountain pastures, whirled along like leaves blown from the mountains by
the September gales. The air is filled with the bleating of calves and
sheep, and the hustling of oxen, as if a pastoral valley were going by.
When the old bell-wether at the head rattles his bell, the mountains do
indeed skip like rams and the little hills like lambs. A carload of
drovers, too, in the midst, on a level with their droves now, their
vocation gone, but still clinging to their useless sticks as their badge
of office. But their dogs, where are they? It is a stampede to them; they
are quite thrown out; they have lost the scent. Methinks I hear them
barking behind the Peterboro' Hills, or panting up the western slope of
the Green Mountains. They will not be in at the death. Their vocation,
too, is gone. Their fidelity and sagacity are below par now. They will
slink back to their kennels in disgrace, or perchance run wild and strike
a league with the wolf and the fox. So is your pastoral life whirled past
and away. But the bell rings, and I must get off the track and let the
cars go by;—</p>
<p>What's the railroad to me?<br/>
I never go to see<br/>
Where it ends.<br/>
It fills a few hollows,<br/>
And makes banks for the swallows,<br/>
It sets the sand a-blowing,<br/>
And the blackberries a-growing,<br/></p>
<p class="nind">
but I cross it like a cart-path in the woods. I will not have my eyes put
out and my ears spoiled by its smoke and steam and hissing.</p>
<p><br/></p>
<p>Now that the cars are gone by and all the restless world with them, and
the fishes in the pond no longer feel their rumbling, I am more alone than
ever. For the rest of the long afternoon, perhaps, my meditations are
interrupted only by the faint rattle of a carriage or team along the
distant highway.</p>
<p>Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the Lincoln, Acton, Bedford, or
Concord bell, when the wind was favorable, a faint, sweet, and, as it
were, natural melody, worth importing into the wilderness. At a sufficient
distance over the woods this sound acquires a certain vibratory hum, as if
the pine needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept.
All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the
same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening
atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the
azure tint it imparts to it. There came to me in this case a melody which
the air had strained, and which had conversed with every leaf and needle
of the wood, that portion of the sound which the elements had taken up and
modulated and echoed from vale to vale. The echo is, to some extent, an
original sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely
a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice
of the wood; the same trivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph.</p>
<p>At evening, the distant lowing of some cow in the horizon beyond the woods
sounded sweet and melodious, and at first I would mistake it for the
voices of certain minstrels by whom I was sometimes serenaded, who might
be straying over hill and dale; but soon I was not unpleasantly
disappointed when it was prolonged into the cheap and natural music of the
cow. I do not mean to be satirical, but to express my appreciation of
those youths' singing, when I state that I perceived clearly that it was
akin to the music of the cow, and they were at length one articulation of
Nature.</p>
<p>Regularly at half-past seven, in one part of the summer, after the evening
train had gone by, the whip-poor-wills chanted their vespers for half an
hour, sitting on a stump by my door, or upon the ridge-pole of the house.
They would begin to sing almost with as much precision as a clock, within
five minutes of a particular time, referred to the setting of the sun,
every evening. I had a rare opportunity to become acquainted with their
habits. Sometimes I heard four or five at once in different parts of the
wood, by accident one a bar behind another, and so near me that I
distinguished not only the cluck after each note, but often that singular
buzzing sound like a fly in a spider's web, only proportionally louder.
Sometimes one would circle round and round me in the woods a few feet
distant as if tethered by a string, when probably I was near its eggs.
They sang at intervals throughout the night, and were again as musical as
ever just before and about dawn.</p>
<p>When other birds are still, the screech owls take up the strain, like
mourning women their ancient u-lu-lu. Their dismal scream is truly Ben
Jonsonian. Wise midnight hags! It is no honest and blunt tu-whit tu-who of
the poets, but, without jesting, a most solemn graveyard ditty, the mutual
consolations of suicide lovers remembering the pangs and the delights of
supernal love in the infernal groves. Yet I love to hear their wailing,
their doleful responses, trilled along the woodside; reminding me
sometimes of music and singing birds; as if it were the dark and tearful
side of music, the regrets and sighs that would fain be sung. They are the
spirits, the low spirits and melancholy forebodings, of fallen souls that
once in human shape night-walked the earth and did the deeds of darkness,
now expiating their sins with their wailing hymns or threnodies in the
scenery of their transgressions. They give me a new sense of the variety
and capacity of that nature which is our common dwelling. <i>Oh-o-o-o-o
that I never had been bor-r-r-r-n!</i> sighs one on this side of the pond,
and circles with the restlessness of despair to some new perch on the gray
oaks. Then—<i>that I never had been bor-r-r-r-n!</i> echoes another
on the farther side with tremulous sincerity, and—<i>bor-r-r-r-n!</i>
comes faintly from far in the Lincoln woods.</p>
<p>I was also serenaded by a hooting owl. Near at hand you could fancy it the
most melancholy sound in Nature, as if she meant by this to stereotype and
make permanent in her choir the dying moans of a human being—some
poor weak relic of mortality who has left hope behind, and howls like an
animal, yet with human sobs, on entering the dark valley, made more awful
by a certain gurgling melodiousness—I find myself beginning with the
letters <i>gl</i> when I try to imitate it—expressive of a mind
which has reached the gelatinous, mildewy stage in the mortification of
all healthy and courageous thought. It reminded me of ghouls and idiots
and insane howlings. But now one answers from far woods in a strain made
really melodious by distance—<i>Hoo hoo hoo, hoorer hoo</i>; and
indeed for the most part it suggested only pleasing associations, whether
heard by day or night, summer or winter.</p>
<p>I rejoice that there are owls. Let them do the idiotic and maniacal
hooting for men. It is a sound admirably suited to swamps and twilight
woods which no day illustrates, suggesting a vast and undeveloped nature
which men have not recognized. They represent the stark twilight and
unsatisfied thoughts which all have. All day the sun has shone on the
surface of some savage swamp, where the single spruce stands hung with
usnea lichens, and small hawks circulate above, and the chickadee lisps
amid the evergreens, and the partridge and rabbit skulk beneath; but now a
more dismal and fitting day dawns, and a different race of creatures
awakes to express the meaning of Nature there.</p>
<p>Late in the evening I heard the distant rumbling of wagons over bridges—a
sound heard farther than almost any other at night—the baying of
dogs, and sometimes again the lowing of some disconsolate cow in a distant
barn-yard. In the mean-while all the shore rang with the trump of
bullfrogs, the sturdy spirits of ancient wine-bibbers and wassailers,
still unrepentant, trying to sing a catch in their Stygian lake—if
the Walden nymphs will pardon the comparison, for though there are almost
no weeds, there are frogs there—who would fain keep up the hilarious
rules of their old festal tables, though their voices have waxed hoarse
and solemnly grave, mocking at mirth, and the wine has lost its flavor,
and become only liquor to distend their paunches, and sweet intoxication
never comes to drown the memory of the past, but mere saturation and
waterloggedness and distention. The most aldermanic, with his chin upon a
heart-leaf, which serves for a napkin to his drooling chaps, under this
northern shore quaffs a deep draught of the once scorned water, and passes
round the cup with the ejaculation <i>tr-r-r-oonk, tr-r-r—oonk,
tr-r-r-oonk!</i> and straightway comes over the water from some distant
cove the same password repeated, where the next in seniority and girth has
gulped down to his mark; and when this observance has made the circuit of
the shores, then ejaculates the master of ceremonies, with satisfaction,
<i>tr-r-r-oonk!</i> and each in his turn repeats the same down to the
least distended, leakiest, and flabbiest paunched, that there be no
mistake; and then the howl goes round again and again, until the sun
disperses the morning mist, and only the patriarch is not under the pond,
but vainly bellowing <i>troonk</i> from time to time, and pausing for a
reply.</p>
<p>I am not sure that I ever heard the sound of cock-crowing from my
clearing, and I thought that it might be worth the while to keep a
cockerel for his music merely, as a singing bird. The note of this once
wild Indian pheasant is certainly the most remarkable of any bird's, and
if they could be naturalized without being domesticated, it would soon
become the most famous sound in our woods, surpassing the clangor of the
goose and the hooting of the owl; and then imagine the cackling of the
hens to fill the pauses when their lords' clarions rested! No wonder that
man added this bird to his tame stock—to say nothing of the eggs and
drumsticks. To walk in a winter morning in a wood where these birds
abounded, their native woods, and hear the wild cockerels crow on the
trees, clear and shrill for miles over the resounding earth, drowning the
feebler notes of other birds—think of it! It would put nations on
the alert. Who would not be early to rise, and rise earlier and earlier
every successive day of his life, till he became unspeakably healthy,
wealthy, and wise? This foreign bird's note is celebrated by the poets of
all countries along with the notes of their native songsters. All climates
agree with brave Chanticleer. He is more indigenous even than the natives.
His health is ever good, his lungs are sound, his spirits never flag. Even
the sailor on the Atlantic and Pacific is awakened by his voice; but its
shrill sound never roused me from my slumbers. I kept neither dog, cat,
cow, pig, nor hens, so that you would have said there was a deficiency of
domestic sounds; neither the churn, nor the spinning-wheel, nor even the
singing of the kettle, nor the hissing of the urn, nor children crying, to
comfort one. An old-fashioned man would have lost his senses or died of
ennui before this. Not even rats in the wall, for they were starved out,
or rather were never baited in—only squirrels on the roof and under
the floor, a whip-poor-will on the ridge-pole, a blue jay screaming
beneath the window, a hare or woodchuck under the house, a screech owl or
a cat owl behind it, a flock of wild geese or a laughing loon on the pond,
and a fox to bark in the night. Not even a lark or an oriole, those mild
plantation birds, ever visited my clearing. No cockerels to crow nor hens
to cackle in the yard. No yard! but unfenced nature reaching up to your
very sills. A young forest growing up under your meadows, and wild sumachs
and blackberry vines breaking through into your cellar; sturdy pitch pines
rubbing and creaking against the shingles for want of room, their roots
reaching quite under the house. Instead of a scuttle or a blind blown off
in the gale—a pine tree snapped off or torn up by the roots behind
your house for fuel. Instead of no path to the front-yard gate in the
Great Snow—no gate—no front-yard—and no path to the
civilized world.</p>
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