220 
WALDEN. 
the way there came up a shower, which compelled me 
to stand half an hour under a pine, piling boughs over 
my head, and wearing my handkerchief for a shed; and 
when at length I had made one cast over the pickerel- 
weed, standing up to my middle in water, I found myself 
suddenly in the shadow of a cloud, and the thunder 
began to rumble with such emphasis that I could do 
no more than listen to it. The gods must be proud, 
thought I, with such forked flashes to rout a poor un¬ 
armed fisherman. So I made haste for shelter to the 
nearest hut, which stood half a mile from any road, but 
so much the nearer to the pond, and had long been 
uninhabited: — 
“ And here a poet builded, 
In the completed years, 
For behold a trivial cabin 
That to destruction steers.** 
So the Muse fables. But therein, as I found, dwelt 
now John Field, an Irishman, and his wife, and several 
children, from the broad-faced boy who assisted his fa¬ 
ther at his work, and now came running by his side 
from the bog to escape the rain, to the wrinkled, sibyl¬ 
like, cone-headed infant that sat upon its father’s knee 
as in the palaces of nobles, and looked out from its 
home in the midst of wet and hunger inquisitively upon 
the stranger, with the privilege of infancy, not knowing 
but it was the last of a noble line, and the hope and cy¬ 
nosure of the world, instead of John Field’s poor starve¬ 
ling brat. There we sat together under that part of 
the roof which leaked the least, while it showered and 
thundered without. I had sat there many times of old 
before the ship was built that floated this family to 
