A barrel-horse tells a story.

April 16. 

The first settlers made preparations to drink a good deal, and they did not disappoint themselves. I observed yesterday, in the cellar of the old Conantum house, a regular frame or "horse" to rest barrels on. It was probably made before the house was built. Two pieces of timber connected by crosspieces lie the whole length of the cellarbottom, with concavities cut in them to receive the barrels and prevent their rolling. 

There are places for eight barrels.

Every New England cellar was once something like it. It suggests how much more preparation was made in those days for the storing of liquors. The settler dug a hole six feet into the earth and laid down a timber to hold his cider-barrel. Then he proceeded to build a house over it.

For twenty and odd years only the woodchucks and field mice have occupied this cellar. The barrels and their contents, and they who emptied them, and the house above, are all gone, and still the scalloped logs remain now in broad daylight to testify to the exact number of barrels of liquor the former occupant expected to lay in. 

His gravestone somewhere tells one sober story no doubt, and this his barrel-horse tells another, -- and the only one that I hear.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 16, 1860

The old Conantum house. See April 11, 1858 ("So this was an old rats’ nest as well as human nest, and so it is with every old house. . . .Conant says this house was built by Rufus Hosmer's great-grandfather.")