When I came to build my chimney I studied masonry.My bricks,being second-hand ones,required to be cleaned with a trowel,so that I learned more than usual of the qualities of bricks and trowels.The mortar on them was fifty years old,and was said to be still growing harder;but this is one of those sayings which men love to repeat whether they are true or not.Such sayings themselves grow harder and adhere more firmly with age,and it would take many blows with a trowel to clean an old wiseacre of them.Many of the villages of Mesopotamia are built of second-hand bricks of a very good quality,obtained from the ruins of Babylon,and the cement on them is older and probably harder still.However that may be,I was struck by the peculiar toughness of the steel which bore so many violent blows without being worn out.As my bricks had been in a chimney before,though I did not read the name of Nebuchadnezzar on them,I picked out as many fireplace bricks as I could find,to save work and waste,and I filled the spaces between the bricks about the fireplace with stones from the pond shore,and also made my mortar with the white sand from the same place.I lingered most about the fireplace,as the most vital part of the house.Indeed,I worked so deliberately,that though I commenced at the ground in the morning,a course of bricks raised a few inches above the floor served for my pillow at night;yet I did not get a stiff neck for it that I remember;my stiff neck is of older date.I took a poet to board for a fortnight about those times,which caused me to be put to it for room.He brought his own knife,though I had two,and we used to scour them by thrusting them into the earth.He shared with me the labors of cooking.I was pleased to see my work rising so square and solid by degrees,and reflected,that,if it proceeded slowly,it was calculated to endure a long time.The chimney is to some extent an independent structure,standing on the ground,and rising through the house to the heavens;even after the house is burned it still stands sometimes,and its importance and independence are apparent.This was toward the end of summer.It was now November.
The north wind had already begun to cool the pond,though it took many weeks of steady blowing to accomplish it,it is so deep.When I began to have a fire at evening,before I plastered my house,the chimney carried smoke particularly well,because of the numerous chinks between the boards.Yet I passed some cheerful evenings in that cool and airy apartment,surrounded by the rough brown boards full of knots,and rafters with the bark on high overhead.My house never pleased my eye so much after it was plastered,though I was obliged to confess that it was more comfortable.Should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead,where flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters?These forms are more agreeable to the fancy and imagination than fresco paintings or other the most expensive furniture.I now first began to inhabit my house,I may say,when I began to use it for warmth as well as shelter.I had got a couple of old fire-dogs to keep the wood from the hearth,and it did me good to see the soot form on the back of the chimney which I had built,and I poked the fire with more right and more satisfaction than usual.My dwelling was small,and I could hardly entertain an echo in it;but it seemed larger for being a single apartment and remote from neighbors.All the attractions of a house were concentrated in one room;it was kitchen,chamber,parlor,and keeping-room;and whatever satisfaction parent or child,master or servant,derive from living in a house,I enjoyed it all.Cato says,the master of a family (patremfamilias)must have in his rustic villa “cellam oleariam,vinariam,dolia multa,uti lubeat caritatem expectare,et rei,et virtuti,et gloriae erit,”that is,“an oil and wine cellar,many casks,so that it may be pleasant to expect hard times;it will be for his advantage,and virtue,and glory.”I had in my cellar a firkin of potatoes,about two quarts of peas with the weevil in them,and on my shelf a little rice,a jug of molasses,and of rye and Indian meal a peck each.
