WHERE I LIYED. 
93 
hand to hand, has gone down the stream of time. With 
this more substantial shelter about me, I had made some 
progress toward settling in the world. This frame, so 
slightly clad, was a sort of crystallization around me, 
and reacted on the builder. It was suggestive somewhat 
as a picture in outlines. I did not need to go out doors 
to take the air, for the atmosphere wdthin had lost none 
of its freshness. It was not so much within doors as 
behind a door where I sat, even in the rainiest weather. 
The Harivansa says, “ An abode without birds is like 
a meat without seasoning.” Such was not my abode, 
for I found myself suddenly neighbor to the birds; not 
by having imprisoned one, but having caged myself near 
them. I was not only nearer to some of those which 
commonly frequent the garden and the orchard, but to 
those wilder and more thrilling songsters of the forest 
which never, or rarely, serenade a villager, — the wood- 
thrush, the veery, the scarlet tanager, the field-sparrow, 
the whippoorwill, and many others. 
I was seated by the shore of a small pond, about a 
mile and a half south of the village of Concord and some¬ 
what higher than it, in the midst of an extensive wood 
between that town and Lincoln, and about two miles 
south of that our only field known to fame, Concord 
Battle Ground; but I was so low in the woods that the 
opposite shore, half a mile off, like the rest, covered with 
wood, was my most distant horizon. For the first week, 
whenever I looked out on the pond it impressed me like 
a tarn high up on the side of a mountain, its bottom far 
above the surface of other lakes, and, as the sun arose, 
I saw it throwing off its nightly clothing of mist, and 
here and there, by degrees, its soft ripples or its smooth 
reflecting surface was revealed, while the mists, like 
