SHELTER. 
33 
road, six feet long by three wide, in which the laborers 
locked np their tools at night, and it suggested to me 
that every man who was hard pushed might get such a 
one for a dollar, and, having bored a few auger holes 
in it, to admit the air at least, get into it when it rained 
and at night, and hook down the lid, and so have freedom 
in his love, and in his soul be free. This did not ap¬ 
pear the worst, nor by any means a despicable alterna¬ 
tive. You could sit up as late as you pleased, and, when¬ 
ever you got up, go abroad without any landlord or 
house-lord dogging you for rent. Many a man is har¬ 
assed to death to pay the rent of a larger and more 
luxurious box who would not have frozen to death in 
such a box as this. I am far from jesting. Economy 
is a subject which admits of being treated with levity, 
but it cannot so be disposed of. A comfortable house 
for a rude and hardy race, that lived mostly out of doors, 
was once made here almost entirely of such materials 
as Nature furnished ready to their hands. Gookin, who 
was superintendent of the Indians subject to the Massa¬ 
chusetts Colony, writing in 1674, says, “The best of 
their houses are covered very neatly, tight and warm, 
with barks of trees, slipped from their bodies at those 
seasons when the sap is up, and made into great flakes, 
with pressure of weighty timber, when they are green. 
... The meaner sort are covered with mats which they 
make of a kind of bulrush, and are also indifferently 
tight and warm, but not so good as the former.... Some 
I have seen, sixty or a hundred feet long and thirty 
feet broad.... I have often lodged in their wigwams, and 
found them as warm as the best English houses.” He 
adds, that they were commonly carpeted and lined with¬ 
in with well-wrought embroidered mats, and were fur- 
3 
