I sometimes dream of a larger and more populous house,standing in a golden age,of enduring materials,and without gingerbread work,which shall still consist of only one room,a vast,rude,substantial,primitive hall,without ceiling or plastering,with bare rafters and purlins supporting a sort of lower heaven over one's head,-useful to keep off rain and snow,where the king and queen posts stand out to receive your homage,when you have done reverence to the prostrate Saturn of an older dynasty on stepping over the sill;a cavernous house,wherein you must reach up a torch upon a pole to see the roof;where some may live in the fireplace,some in the recess of the window,and some on settles,some at one end of the hall,some at another,and some aloft on rafters with the spiders,if they choose;a house which you have got into when you have opened the outside door,and the ceremony is over;where the weary traveller may wash,and eat,and converse,and sleep,without further journey;such a shelter as you would be glad to reach in a tempestuous night,containing all the essentials of a house,and nothing for house-keeping;where you can see all the treasures of the house at one view,and everything hangs upon its peg that a man should use;at once kitchen,pantry,parlor,chamber,storehouse,and garret;where you can see so necessary a thing as a barrel or a ladder,so convenient a thing as a cupboard,and hear the pot boil,and pay your respects to the fire that cooks your dinner,and the oven that bakes your bread,and the necessary furniture and utensils are the chief ornaments;where the washing is not put out,nor the fire,nor the mistress,and perhaps you are sometimes requested to move from off the trap-door,when the cook would descend into the cellar,and so learn whether the ground is solid or hollow beneath you without stamping.A house whose inside is as open and manifest as a bird's nest,and you cannot go in at the front door and out at the back without seeing some of its inhabitants;where to be a guest is to be presented with the freedom of the house,and not to be carefully excluded from seven eighths of it,shut up in a particular cell,and told to make yourself at home there,-in solitary confinement.Nowadays the host does not admit you to his hearth,but has got the mason to build one for yourself somewhere in his alley,and hospitality is the art of keeping you at the greatest distance.There is as much secrecy about the cooking as if he had a design to poison you.I am aware that I have been on many a man's premises,and might have been legally ordered off,but I am not aware that I have been in many men's houses.I might visit in my old clothes a king and queen who lived simply in such a house as I have described,if I were going their way;but backing out of a modern palace will be all that I shall desire to learn,if ever I am caught in one.
It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its nerve and degenerate into palaver wholly,our lives pass at such remoteness from its symbols,and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far fetched,through slides and dumb-waiters,as it were;in other words,the parlor is so far from the kitchen and workshop.The dinner even is only the parable of a dinner,commonly.As if only the savage dwelt near enough to Nature and Truth to borrow a trope from them.How can the scholar,who dwells away in the North West Territory or the Isle of Man,tell what is parliamentary in the kitchen?
However,only one or two of my guests were ever bold enough to stay and eat a hasty-pudding with me;but when they saw that crisis approaching they beat a hasty retreat rather,as if it would shake the house to its foundations.Nevertheless,it stood through a great many hasty-puddings.
I did not plaster till it was freezing weather.I brought over some whiter and cleaner sand for this purpose from the opposite shore of the pond in a boat,a sort of conveyance which would have tempted me to go much farther if necessary.My house had in the meanwhile been shingled down to the ground on every side.In lathing I was pleased to be able to send home each nail with a single blow of the hammer,and it was my ambition to transfer the plaster from the board to the wall neatly and rapidly.I remembered the story of a conceited fellow,who,in fine clothes,was wont to lounge about the village once,giving advice to workmen.Venturing one day to substitute deeds for words,he turned up his cuffs,seized a plasterer's board,and having loaded his trowel without mishap,with a complacent look toward the lathing overhead,made a bold gesture thitherward;and straightway,to his complete discomfiture,received the whole contents in his ruffled bosom.I admired anew the economy and convenience of plastering,which so effectually shuts out the cold and takes a handsome finish,and I learned the various casualties to which the plasterer is liable.I was surprised to see how thirsty the bricks were which drank up all the moisture in my plaster before I had smoothed it,and how many pailfuls of water it takes to christen a new hearth.I had the previous winter made a small quantity of lime by burning the shells of the Unio fluviatilis,which our river affords,for the sake of the experiment;so that I knew where my materials came from.I might have got good limestone within a mile or two and burned it myself,if I had cared to do so.
