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| November 26, 2017 |
Speaking of those long, dry, barren hollows in the Richardson wood-lot with Ebby Hubbard, he says that the reason why no trees have sprung up in them is because the trees were very old when they were cut, and no sprouts came up from the stumps. Otherwise the lowest ground is the best-timbered. I have referred it to frost.
Rice tells me he remembers that Nathan Barrett's father used to stutter. He went round collecting the direct taxes soon after the Revolution, — on carriages, watches, dogs, etc., etc. It was perhaps a dollar on a dog. Coming to Captain Bent's, who kept tavern in Sudbury where Israel Rice lives, he collected his tax and then said, “I want you to may-ma-ma-ma-make me a ha-ha-ha-ha-ha — to make me a ha-ha-ha — a whole mug o' flip.”
Got my boat up this afternoon. (It is Thanksgiving Day.) One end had frozen in.
I see that already some eager urchins have been able to try their skates on a short and narrow strip of ice by the riverside there.
Minott's is a small, square, one-storied and unpainted house, with a hipped roof and at least one dormer window, a third the way up the south side of a long hill which is some fifty feet high and extends east and west. A traveller of taste may go straight through the village without being detained a moment by any dwelling, either the form or surroundings being objectionable, but very few go by this house without being agreeably impressed, and many are therefore led to inquire who lives in it.
Not that its form is so incomparable, nor even its weather-stained color, but chiefly, I think, because of its snug and picturesque position on the hillside, fairly lodged there, where all children like to be, and its perfect harmony with its surroundings and position. For if, preserving this form and color, it should be transplanted to the meadow below, nobody would notice it more than a schoolhouse which was lately of the same form. It is there because somebody was independent or bold enough to carry out the happy thought of placing it high on the hillside.
It is the locality, not the architecture, that takes us captive.
There is exactly such a site, only of course less room on either side, between this house and the next westward, but few if any, even of the admiring travellers, have thought of this as a house-lot, or would be bold enough to place a cottage there. Without side fences or gravelled walks or flower plats, that simple sloping bank before it is pleasanter than any front yard, though many a visitor—and many times the master — has slipped and fallen on the steep path.
From its position and exposure, it has shelter and warmth and dryness and prospect. He overlooks the road, the meadow and brook, and houses beyond, to the distant woods.
The spring comes earlier to that dooryard than to any, and summer lingers longest there.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 26, 1857
Rice tells me he remembers that Nathan Barrett's father used to stutter. He went round collecting the direct taxes soon after the Revolution, — on carriages, watches, dogs, etc., etc. It was perhaps a dollar on a dog. Coming to Captain Bent's, who kept tavern in Sudbury where Israel Rice lives, he collected his tax and then said, “I want you to may-ma-ma-ma-make me a ha-ha-ha-ha-ha — to make me a ha-ha-ha — a whole mug o' flip.”
Got my boat up this afternoon. (It is Thanksgiving Day.) One end had frozen in.
I see that already some eager urchins have been able to try their skates on a short and narrow strip of ice by the riverside there.
Minott's is a small, square, one-storied and unpainted house, with a hipped roof and at least one dormer window, a third the way up the south side of a long hill which is some fifty feet high and extends east and west. A traveller of taste may go straight through the village without being detained a moment by any dwelling, either the form or surroundings being objectionable, but very few go by this house without being agreeably impressed, and many are therefore led to inquire who lives in it.
Not that its form is so incomparable, nor even its weather-stained color, but chiefly, I think, because of its snug and picturesque position on the hillside, fairly lodged there, where all children like to be, and its perfect harmony with its surroundings and position. For if, preserving this form and color, it should be transplanted to the meadow below, nobody would notice it more than a schoolhouse which was lately of the same form. It is there because somebody was independent or bold enough to carry out the happy thought of placing it high on the hillside.
It is the locality, not the architecture, that takes us captive.
There is exactly such a site, only of course less room on either side, between this house and the next westward, but few if any, even of the admiring travellers, have thought of this as a house-lot, or would be bold enough to place a cottage there. Without side fences or gravelled walks or flower plats, that simple sloping bank before it is pleasanter than any front yard, though many a visitor—and many times the master — has slipped and fallen on the steep path.
From its position and exposure, it has shelter and warmth and dryness and prospect. He overlooks the road, the meadow and brook, and houses beyond, to the distant woods.
The spring comes earlier to that dooryard than to any, and summer lingers longest there.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 26, 1857
Got my boat up this afternoon. See December 5, 1853 ("Got my boat in. The river frozen over thinly in most places and whitened with snow ...”); December 2, 1854 (“Got up my boat and housed it, ice having formed about it.”); November 30, 1855 (“Got in my boat. River remained iced over all day. ”); December 2, 1856 (“Got in my boat . . . It made me sweat to wheel it home through the snow”); November 26, 1858 (“Got in boat on account of Reynolds’s new fence going up (earlier than usual).”); December 10, 1859 (“Get in my boat, in the snow. The bottom is coated with a glaze.”); November 29, 1860 (“Get up my boat, 7 a. m. Thin ice of the night is floating down the river.”) See also December 5, 1856:
"I love to have the river
closed up for a season
and a pause put to my boating,
to be obliged to get my boat in.
I shall launch it again in the spring
with so much more pleasure.
I love best to have each thing
in its season only,
and enjoy doing without it
at all other times. "
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