A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers - Pennsylvania State ...

indeed, and would be ashamed of themselves in a few years,
when they had outgrown this verdant period. There was,
moreover, a singular disposition to wit and humor, but rarely
the slightest real success; and the apparent success was a terrible
satire on the attempt; the Evil Genius of man laughed
the loudest at his best jokes. The advertisements, as I have
said, such as were serious, and not of the modern quack kind,
suggested pleasing and poetic thoughts; for commerce is really
as interesting as nature. The very names of the commodities
were poetic, and as suggestive as if they had been
inserted in a pleasing poem,—Lumber, Cotton, Sugar, Hides,
Guano, Logwood. Some sober, private, and original thought
would have been grateful to read there, and as much in harmony
with the circumstances as if it had been written on a
mountain-top; for it is of a fashion which never changes,
and as respectable as hides and logwood, or any natural product.
What an inestimable companion such a scrap of paper
would have been, containing some fruit of a mature life. What
a relic! What a recipe! It seemed a divine invention, by which
not mere shining coin, but shining and current thoughts,
could be brought up and left there.
A <strong>Week</strong> on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
144
As it was cold, I collected quite a pile of wood and lay
down on a board against the side of the building, not having
any blanket to cover me, with my head to the fire, that I
might look after it, which is not the Indian rule. But as it
grew colder towards midnight, I at length encased myself
completely in boards, managing even to put a board on top
of me, with a large stone on it, to keep it down, and so slept
comfortably. I was reminded, it is true, of the Irish children,
who inquired what their neighbors did who had no door to
put over them in winter nights as they had; but I am convinced
that there was nothing very strange in the inquiry.
Those who have never tried it can have no idea how far a
door, which keeps the single blanket down, may go toward
making one comfortable. We are constituted a good deal like
chickens, which taken from the hen, and put in a basket of
cotton in the chimney-corner, will often peep till they die,
nevertheless, but if you put in a book, or anything heavy,
which will press down the cotton, and feel like the hen, they
go to sleep directly. My only companions were the mice,
which came to pick up the crumbs that had been left in
those scraps of paper; still, as everywhere, pensioners on man,