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few are able to tell exactly what their houses cost, and fewer still,

if any, the separate cost of the various materials which compose them:—

Boards.......................... $ 8.03½, mostly shanty boards.

Refuse shingles for roof sides,.. 4.00

Laths,........................... 1.25

Two second-hand windows

with glass,................... 2.43

One thousand old brick,.......... 4.00

Two casks of lime,............... 2.40 That was high.

Hair,............................ 0.31 More than I needed.

Mantle-tree iron,................ 0.15

Nails,........................... 3.90

Hinges and screws,............... 0.14

Latch,........................... 0.10

Chalk,........................... 0.01

Transportation,.................. 1.40 I carried a good part

———— on my back.

In all,..................... $28.12½

These are all the materials excepting the timber stones and sand, which

I claimed by squatter’s right. I have also a small wood-shed adjoining,

made chiefly of the stuff which was left after building the house.

I intend to build me a house which will surpass any on the main street

in Concord in grandeur and luxury, as soon as it pleases me as much and

will cost me no more than my present one.

I thus found that the student who wishes for a shelter can obtain one

for a lifetime at an expense not greater than the rent which he now

pays annually. If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is

that I brag for humanity rather than for myself; and my shortcomings

and inconsistencies do not affect the truth of my statement.

Notwithstanding much cant and hypocrisy,—chaff which I find it

difficult to separate from my wheat, but for which I am as sorry as any

man,—I will breathe freely and stretch myself in this respect, it is

such a relief to both the moral and physical system; and I am resolved

that I will not through humility become the devil’s attorney. I will

endeavor to speak a good word for the truth. At Cambridge College the

mere rent of a student’s room, which is only a little larger than my

own, is thirty dollars each year, though the corporation had the

advantage of building thirty-two side by side and under one roof, and

the occupant suffers the inconvenience of many and noisy neighbors, and

perhaps a residence in the fourth story. I cannot but think that if we

had more true wisdom in these respects, not only less education would

be needed, because, forsooth, more would already have been acquired,

but the pecuniary expense of getting an education would in a great

measure vanish. Those conveniences which the student requires at

Cambridge or elsewhere cost him or somebody else ten times as great a

sacrifice of life as they would with proper management on both sides.

Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things

which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important

item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which

he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries

no charge is made. The mode of founding a college is, commonly, to get

up a subscription of dollars and cents, and then following blindly the

principles of a division of labor to its extreme, a principle which

should never be followed but with circumspection,—to call in a

contractor who makes this a subject of speculation, and he employs

Irishmen or other operatives actually to lay the foundations, while the

students that are to be are said to be fitting themselves for it; and

for these oversights successive generations have to pay. I think that

it would be _better than this_, for the students, or those who desire

to be benefited by it, even to lay the foundation themselves. The

student who secures his coveted leisure and retirement by

systematically shirking any labor necessary to man obtains but an

ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself of the experience

which alone can make leisure fruitful. “But,” says one, “you do not

mean that the students should go to work with their hands instead of

their heads?” I do not mean that exactly, but I mean something which he

might think a good deal like that; I mean that they should not _play_

life, or _study_ it merely, while the community supports them at this

expensive game, but earnestly _live_ it from beginning to end. How

could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment

of living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as

mathematics. If I wished a boy to know something about the arts and

sciences, for instance, I would not pursue the common course, which is

merely to send him into the neighborhood of some professor, where any

thing is professed and practised but the art of life;—to survey the

world through a telescope or a microscope, and never with his natural

eye; to study chemistry, and not learn how his bread is made, or

mechanics, and not learn how it is earned; to discover new satellites

to Neptune, and not detect the motes in his eyes, or to what vagabond

he is a satellite himself; or to be devoured by the monsters that swarm

all around him, while contemplating the monsters in a drop of vinegar.

Which would have advanced the most at the end of a month,—the boy who

had made his own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and smelted,

reading as much as would be necessary for this,—or the boy who had

attended the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in the mean while,

and had received a Rodgers’ penknife from his father? Which would be

most likely to cut his fingers?... To my astonishment I was informed on

leaving college that I had studied navigation!—why, if I had taken one

turn down the harbor I should have known more about it. Even the _poor_

student studies and is taught only _political_ economy, while that

economy of living which is synonymous with philosophy is not even

sincerely professed in our colleges. The consequence is, that while he

is reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt

irretrievably.

As with our colleges, so with a hundred “modern improvements”; there is

an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The

devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his early

share and numerous succeeding investments in them. Our inventions are

wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious

things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which

it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston

or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph

from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing

important to communicate. Either is in such a predicament as the man

who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but

when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his

hand, had nothing to say. As if the main object were to talk fast and

not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and

bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the

first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear

will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough. After all,

the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most

important messages; he is not an evangelist, nor does he come round

eating locusts and wild honey. I doubt if Flying Childers ever carried

a peck of corn to mill.

One says to me, “I wonder that you do not lay up money; you love to

travel; you might take the cars and go to Fitchburg to-day and see the

country.” But I am wiser than that. I have learned that the swiftest

traveller is he that goes afoot. I say to my friend, Suppose we try who

will get there first. The distance is thirty miles; the fare ninety

cents. That is almost a day’s wages. I remember when wages were sixty

cents a day for laborers on this very road. Well, I start now on foot,

and get there before night; I have travelled at that rate by the week

together. You will in the mean while have earned your fare, and arrive

there some time to-morrow, or possibly this evening, if you are lucky

enough to get a job in season. Instead of going to Fitchburg, you will

be working here the greater part of the day. And so, if the railroad

reached round the world, I think that I should keep ahead of you; and

as for seeing the country and getting experience of that kind, I should

have to cut your acquaintance altogether.

Such is the universal law, which no man can ever outwit, and with

regard to the railroad even we may say it is as broad as it is long. To

make a railroad round the world available to all mankind is equivalent

to grading the whole surface of the planet. Men have an indistinct

notion that if they keep up this activity of joint stocks and spades

long enough all will at length ride somewhere, in next to no time, and

for nothing; but though a crowd rushes to the depot, and the conductor

shouts “All aboard!” when the smoke is blown away and the vapor

condensed, it will be perceived that a few are riding, but the rest are

run over,—and it will be called, and will be, “A melancholy accident.”

No doubt they can ride at last who shall have earned their fare, that

is, if they survive so long, but they will probably have lost their

elasticity and desire to travel by that time. This spending of the best

part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable

liberty during the least valuable part of it, reminds me of the

Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he

might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have

gone up garret at once. “What!” exclaim a million Irishmen starting up

from all the shanties in the land, “is not this railroad which we have

built a good thing?” Yes, I answer, _comparatively_ good, that is, you

might have done worse; but I wish, as you are brothers of mine, that

you could have spent your time better than digging in this dirt.

Before I finished my house, wishing to earn ten or twelve dollars by

some honest and agreeable method, in order to meet my unusual expenses,

I planted about two acres and a half of light and sandy soil near it

chiefly with beans, but also a small part with potatoes, corn, peas,

and turnips. The whole lot contains eleven acres, mostly growing up to

pines and hickories, and was sold the preceding season for eight

dollars and eight cents an acre. One farmer said that it was “good for

nothing but to raise cheeping squirrels on.” I put no manure whatever

on this land, not being the owner, but merely a squatter, and not

expecting to cultivate so much again, and I did not quite hoe it all

once. I got out several cords of stumps in ploughing, which supplied me

with fuel for a long time, and left small circles of virgin mould,

easily distinguishable through the summer by the greater luxuriance of

the beans there. The dead and for the most part unmerchantable wood

behind my house, and the driftwood from the pond, have supplied the

remainder of my fuel. I was obliged to hire a team and a man for the

ploughing, though I held the plough myself. My farm outgoes for the

first season were, for implements, seed, work, &c., $14.72½. The seed

corn was given me. This never costs anything to speak of, unless you

plant more than enough. I got twelve bushels of beans, and eighteen

bushels of potatoes, beside some peas and sweet corn. The yellow corn

and turnips were too late to come to any thing. My whole income from

the farm was $ 23.44 Deducting the outgoes,........... 14.72½ There are left,................. $ 8.71½,

beside produce consumed and on hand at the time this estimate was made

of the value of $4.50,—the amount on hand much more than balancing a

little grass which I did not raise. All things considered, that is,

considering the importance of a man’s soul and of to-day,

notwithstanding the short time occupied by my experiment, nay, partly

even because of its transient character, I believe that that was doing

better than any farmer in Concord did that year.

The next year I did better still, for I spaded up all the land which I

required, about a third of an acre, and I learned from the experience

of both years, not being in the least awed by many celebrated works on

husbandry, Arthur Young among the rest, that if one would live simply

and eat only the crop which he raised, and raise no more than he ate,

and not exchange it for an insufficient quantity of more luxurious and

expensive things, he would need to cultivate only a few rods of ground,

and that it would be cheaper to spade up that than to use oxen to

plough it, and to select a fresh spot from time to time than to manure

the old, and he could do all his necessary farm work as it were with

his left hand at odd hours in the summer; and thus he would not be tied

to an ox, or horse, or cow, or pig, as at present. I desire to speak

impartially on this point, and as one not interested in the success or

failure of the present economical and social arrangements. I was more

independent than any farmer in Concord, for I was not anchored to a

house or farm, but could follow the bent of my genius, which is a very

crooked one, every moment. Beside being better off than they already,

if my house had been burned or my crops had failed, I should have been

nearly as well off as before.

I am wont to think that men are not so much the keepers of herds as

herds are the keepers of men, the former are so much the freer. Men and

oxen exchange work; but if we consider necessary work only, the oxen

will be seen to have greatly the advantage, their farm is so much the

larger. Man does some of his part of the exchange work in his six weeks

of haying, and it is no boy’s play. Certainly no nation that lived

simply in all respects, that is, no nation of philosophers, would

commit so great a blunder as to use the labor of animals. True, there

never was and is not likely soon to be a nation of philosophers, nor am

I certain it is desirable that there should be. However, _I_ should

never have broken a horse or bull and taken him to board for any work

he might do for me, for fear I should become a horse-man or a herds-man

merely; and if society seems to be the gainer by so doing, are we

certain that what is one man’s gain is not another’s loss, and that the

stable-boy has equal cause with his master to be satisfied? Granted

that some public works would not have been constructed without this

aid, and let man share the glory of such with the ox and horse; does it

follow that he could not have accomplished works yet more worthy of

himself in that case? When men begin to do, not merely unnecessary or

artistic, but luxurious and idle work, with their assistance, it is

inevitable that a few do all the exchange work with the oxen, or, in

other words, become the slaves of the strongest. Man thus not only

works for the animal within him, but, for a symbol of this, he works

for the animal without him. Though we have many substantial houses of

brick or stone, the prosperity of the farmer is still measured by the

degree to which the barn overshadows the house. This town is said to

have the largest houses for oxen, cows, and horses hereabouts, and it

is not behindhand in its public buildings; but there are very few halls

for free worship or free speech in this county. It should not be by

their architecture, but why not even by their power of abstract

thought, that nations should seek to commemorate themselves? How much

more admirable the Bhagvat-Geeta than all the ruins of the East! Towers

and temples are the luxury of princes. A simple and independent mind

does not toil at the bidding of any prince. Genius is not a retainer to

any emperor, nor is its material silver, or gold, or marble, except to

a trifling extent. To what end, pray, is so much stone hammered? In

Arcadia, when I was there, I did not see any hammering stone. Nations

are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of

themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave. What if equal

pains were taken to smooth and polish their manners? One piece of good

sense would be more memorable than a monument as high as the moon. I

love better to see stones in place. The grandeur of Thebes was a vulgar

grandeur. More sensible is a rod of stone wall that bounds an honest

man’s field than a hundred-gated Thebes that has wandered farther from

the true end of life. The religion and civilization which are barbaric

and heathenish build splendid temples; but what you might call

Christianity does not. Most of the stone a nation hammers goes toward

its tomb only. It buries itself alive. As for the Pyramids, there is

nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could

be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for

some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have

drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs. I might

possibly invent some excuse for them and him, but I have no time for

it. As for the religion and love of art of the builders, it is much the

same all the world over, whether the building be an Egyptian temple or

the United States Bank. It costs more than it comes to. The mainspring

is vanity, assisted by the love of garlic and bread and butter. Mr.

Balcom, a promising young architect, designs it on the back of his

Vitruvius, with hard pencil and ruler, and the job is let out to Dobson

& Sons, stonecutters. When the thirty centuries begin to look down on

it, mankind begin to look up at it. As for your high towers and

monuments, there was a crazy fellow once in this town who undertook to

dig through to China, and he got so far that, as he said, he heard the

Chinese pots and kettles rattle; but I think that I shall not go out of

my way to admire the hole which he made. Many are concerned about the

monuments of the West and the East,—to know who built them. For my

part, I should like to know who in those days did not build them,—who

were above such trifling. But to proceed with my statistics.

By surveying, carpentry, and day-labor of various other kinds in the

village in the mean while, for I have as many trades as fingers, I had

earned $13.34. The expense of food for eight months, namely, from July

4th to March 1st, the time when these estimates were made, though I

lived there more than two years,—not counting potatoes, a little green

corn, and some peas, which I had raised, nor considering the value of

what was on hand at the last date, was

Rice,................... $ 1.73½

Molasses,................ 1.73 Cheapest form of the

saccharine.

Rye meal,................ 1.04¾

Indian meal,............. 0.99¾ Cheaper than rye.

Pork,.................... 0.22

All experiments which failed:

Flour,................... 0.88 Costs more than Indian meal,

both money and trouble.

Sugar,................... 0.80

Lard,.................... 0.65

Apples,.................. 0.25

Dried apple,............. 0.22

Sweet potatoes,.......... 0.10

One pumpkin,............. 0.06

One watermelon,.......... 0.02

Salt,.................... 0.03

Yes, I did eat $8.74, all told; but I should not thus unblushingly

publish my guilt, if I did not know that most of my readers were

equally guilty with myself, and that their deeds would look no better

in print. The next year I sometimes caught a mess of fish for my

dinner, and once I went so far as to slaughter a woodchuck which

ravaged my bean-field,—effect his transmigration, as a Tartar would

say,—and devour him, partly for experiment’s sake; but though it

afforded me a momentary enjoyment, notwithstanding a musky flavor, I

saw that the longest use would not make that a good practice, however

it might seem to have your woodchucks ready dressed by the village

butcher.

Clothing and some incidental expenses within the same dates, though

little can be inferred from this item, amounted to

$8.40¾

Oil and some household utensils,....... 2.00

So that all the pecuniary outgoes, excepting for washing and mending,

which for the most part were done out of the house, and their bills

have not yet been received,—and these are all and more than all the

ways by which money necessarily goes out in this part of the

world,—were

House,................................ $ 28.12½

Farm one year,.......................... 14.72½

Food eight months,...................... 8.74

Clothing, etc., eight months,........... 8.40¾

Oil, &c., eight months,................. 2.00

——————

In all,........................... $ 61.99¾

I address myself now to those of my readers who have a living to get.

And to meet this I have for farm produce sold

$23.44

Earned by day-labor,................... 13.34

——————

In all,............................ $36.78,

which subtracted from the sum of the outgoes leaves a balance of

$25.21¾ on the one side,—this being very nearly the means with which I

started, and the measure of expenses to be incurred,—and on the other,

beside the leisure and independence and health thus secured, a

comfortable house for me as long as I choose to occupy it.

These statistics, however accidental and therefore uninstructive they

may appear, as they have a certain completeness, have a certain value

also. Nothing was given me of which I have not rendered some account.

It appears from the above estimate, that my food alone cost me in money

about twenty-seven cents a week. It was, for nearly two years after

this, rye and Indian meal without yeast, potatoes, rice, a very little

salt pork, molasses, and salt, and my drink water. It was fit that I

should live on rice, mainly, who loved so well the philosophy of India.

To meet the objections of some inveterate cavillers, I may as well

state, that if I dined out occasionally, as I always had done, and I

trust shall have opportunities to do again, it was frequently to the

detriment of my domestic arrangements. But the dining out, being, as I

have stated, a constant element, does not in the least affect a

comparative statement like this.

I learned from my two years’ experience that it would cost incredibly

little trouble to obtain one’s necessary food, even in this latitude;

that a man may use as simple a diet as the animals, and yet retain

health and strength. I have made a satisfactory dinner, satisfactory on

several accounts, simply off a dish of purslane (_Portulaca oleracea_)

which I gathered in my cornfield, boiled and salted. I give the Latin

on account of the savoriness of the trivial name. And pray what more

can a reasonable man desire, in peaceful times, in ordinary noons, than

a sufficient number of ears of green sweet-corn boiled, with the

addition of salt? Even the little variety which I used was a yielding

to the demands of appetite, and not of health. Yet men have come to

such a pass that they frequently starve, not for want of necessaries,

but for want of luxuries; and I know a good woman who thinks that her

son lost his life because he took to drinking water only.

The reader will perceive that I am treating the subject rather from an

economic than a dietetic point of view, and he will not venture to put

my abstemiousness to the test unless he has a well-stocked larder.

Bread I at first made of pure Indian meal and salt, genuine hoe-cakes,

which I baked before my fire out of doors on a shingle or the end of a

stick of timber sawed off in building my house; but it was wont to get

smoked and to have a piny flavor. I tried flour also; but have at last

found a mixture of rye and Indian meal most convenient and agreeable.

In cold weather it was no little amusement to bake several small loaves

of this in succession, tending and turning them as carefully as an

Egyptian his hatching eggs. They were a real cereal fruit which I

ripened, and they had to my senses a fragrance like that of other noble

fruits, which I kept in as long as possible by wrapping them in cloths.

I made a study of the ancient and indispensable art of bread-making,

consulting such authorities as offered, going back to the primitive

days and first invention of the unleavened kind, when from the wildness

of nuts and meats men first reached the mildness and refinement of this

diet, and travelling gradually down in my studies through that

accidental souring of the dough which, it is supposed, taught the

leavening process, and through the various fermentations thereafter,

till I came to “good, sweet, wholesome bread,” the staff of life.

Leaven, which some deem the soul of bread, the _spiritus_ which fills

its cellular tissue, which is religiously preserved like the vestal

fire,—some precious bottle-full, I suppose, first brought over in the

Mayflower, did the business for America, and its influence is still

rising, swelling, spreading, in cerealian billows over the land,—this

seed I regularly and faithfully procured from the village, till at

length one morning I forgot the rules, and scalded my yeast; by which

accident I discovered that even this was not indispensable,—for my

discoveries were not by the synthetic but analytic process,—and I have

gladly omitted it since, though most housewives earnestly assured me

that safe and wholesome bread without yeast might not be, and elderly

people prophesied a speedy decay of the vital forces. Yet I find it not

to be an essential ingredient, and after going without it for a year am

still in the land of the living; and I am glad to escape the

trivialness of carrying a bottle-full in my pocket, which would

sometimes pop and discharge its contents to my discomfiture. It is

simpler and more respectable to omit it. Man is an animal who more than

any other can adapt himself to all climates and circumstances. Neither

did I put any sal soda, or other acid or alkali, into my bread. It

would seem that I made it according to the recipe which Marcus Porcius

Cato gave about two centuries before Christ. “Panem depsticium sic

facito. Manus mortariumque bene lavato. Farinam in mortarium indito,

aquæ paulatim addito, subigitoque pulchre. Ubi bene subegeris,

defingito, coquitoque sub testu.” Which I take to mean—“Make kneaded

bread thus. Wash your hands and trough well. Put the meal into the

trough, add water gradually, and knead it thoroughly. When you have

kneaded it well, mould it, and bake it under a cover,” that is, in a

baking-kettle. Not a word about leaven. But I did not always use this

staff of life. At one time, owing to the emptiness of my purse, I saw

none of it for more than a month.

Every New Englander might easily raise all his own breadstuffs in this

land of rye and Indian corn, and not depend on distant and fluctuating

markets for them. Yet so far are we from simplicity and independence

that, in Concord, fresh and sweet meal is rarely sold in the shops, and

hominy and corn in a still coarser form are hardly used by any. For the

most part the farmer gives to his cattle and hogs the grain of his own

producing, and buys flour, which is at least no more wholesome, at a

greater cost, at the store. I saw that I could easily raise my bushel

or two of rye and Indian corn, for the former will grow on the poorest

land, and the latter does not require the best, and grind them in a

hand-mill, and so do without rice and pork; and if I must have some

concentrated sweet, I found by experiment that I could make a very good

molasses either of pumpkins or beets, and I knew that I needed only to

set out a few maples to obtain it more easily still, and while these

were growing I could use various substitutes beside those which I have

named. “For,” as the Forefathers sang,—

“we can make liquor to sweeten our lips

Of pumpkins and parsnips and walnut-tree chips.”

Finally, as for salt, that grossest of groceries, to obtain this might

be a fit occasion for a visit to the seashore, or, if I did without it

altogether, I should probably drink the less water. I do not learn that

the Indians ever troubled themselves to go after it.

Thus I could avoid all trade and barter, so far as my food was

concerned, and having a shelter already, it would only remain to get

clothing and fuel. The pantaloons which I now wear were woven in a

farmer’s family,—thank Heaven there is so much virtue still in man; for