year.
He knows his wood-lot and what grows in it as well as an ordinary farmer does his corn-field, for he has cut his own wood till within two or three years; knows the history of every stump on it and the age of every sapling; knows how many beech trees and black birches there are there, as another knows his pear or cherry trees.
He complains that the choppers make a very long carf nowadays, doing most of the cutting on one side, to avoid changing hands so much.
It is more economical, as well as more poetical, to have a wood-lot and cut and get out your own wood from year to year than to buy it at your door.
Minott may say to his trees: "Submit to my axe. I cut your father on this very spot." How many sweet passages there must have been in his life there, chopping all alone in the short winter days! How many rabbits, partridges, foxes he saw! A rill runs through the lot, where he quenched his thirst, and several times he has laid it bare.
At last rheumatism has made him a prisoner, and he is compelled to let a stranger, a vandal, it may be, go into his lot with an axe.
It is fit that he should be buried there.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 11, 1856
. . .supplied all their fuel for thirty years, and he thinks would constantly continue to do so. See August 30, 1860 ("Minott is an old-fashioned man and has not scrubbed up and improved his land as many, or most, have. It is in a wilder and more primitive condition.”) Compare October 16, 1860 ("The history of a wood-lot is often, if not commonly, here, a history of cross-purposes, - of steady and consistent endeavor on the part of Nature, of interference and blundering with a glimmering of intelligence at the eleventh hour on the part of the proprietor.”) with November 2, 1860 ("Ebby Hubbard's [wood]was never cut off but only cut out of.")
He knows his wood-lot and what grows in it as well as an ordinary farmer does his corn-field, for he has cut his own wood till within two or three years; knows the history of every stump on it and the age of every sapling; knows how many beech trees and black birches there are there, as another knows his pear or cherry trees.
He complains that the choppers make a very long carf nowadays, doing most of the cutting on one side, to avoid changing hands so much.
It is more economical, as well as more poetical, to have a wood-lot and cut and get out your own wood from year to year than to buy it at your door.
Minott may say to his trees: "Submit to my axe. I cut your father on this very spot." How many sweet passages there must have been in his life there, chopping all alone in the short winter days! How many rabbits, partridges, foxes he saw! A rill runs through the lot, where he quenched his thirst, and several times he has laid it bare.
At last rheumatism has made him a prisoner, and he is compelled to let a stranger, a vandal, it may be, go into his lot with an axe.
It is fit that he should be buried there.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 11, 1856
. . .supplied all their fuel for thirty years, and he thinks would constantly continue to do so. See August 30, 1860 ("Minott is an old-fashioned man and has not scrubbed up and improved his land as many, or most, have. It is in a wilder and more primitive condition.”) Compare October 16, 1860 ("The history of a wood-lot is often, if not commonly, here, a history of cross-purposes, - of steady and consistent endeavor on the part of Nature, of interference and blundering with a glimmering of intelligence at the eleventh hour on the part of the proprietor.”) with November 2, 1860 ("Ebby Hubbard's [wood]was never cut off but only cut out of.")
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