HO USE-WARMING. 
259 
quarters in November, I used to resort to the north-east 
side of Walden, which the sun, reflected from the pitch- 
pine woods and the stony shore, made the fire-side of 
the pond; it is so much pleasanter and wholesomer to be 
warmed by the sun while you can be, than by an artifi¬ 
cial fire. I thus warmed myself by the still glowing 
embers which the summer, like a departed hunter, 
had left. 
When I came to build my chimney I studied masonry 
My bricks being second-hand ones required to be 
cleaned with a trowel, so that I learned more than 
usual of the qualities of bricks and trowels. The mor¬ 
tar on them was fifty years old, and was said to be still 
growing harder; but this is one of those sayings which 
men love to repeat whether they are true or not. Such 
sayings themselves grow harder and adhere more firmly 
with age, and it would take many blows with a trowel 
to clean an old wiseacre of them. Many of the villages 
of Mesopotamia are built of second-hand bricks of a 
very good quality, obtained from the ruins of Babylon, 
and the cement on them is older and probably harder 
still. However that may be, I was struck by the pecu¬ 
liar toughness of the steel which bore so many violent 
blows without being worn out. As my bricks had been 
in a chimney before, though I did not read the name of 
Nebuchadnezzar on them, I picked out as many fire¬ 
place bricks as I could find, to save work and waste, and 
I filled the spaces between the bricks about the fire¬ 
place with stones from the pond shore, and also made 
my mortar with the white sand from the same place. I 
lingered most about the fireplace, as the most vital part 
