HOUSE-WARMING. 
261 
ering shadows may play at evening about the rafters ? 
These forms are more agreeable to the fancy and imagi¬ 
nation than fresco paintings or other the most expen¬ 
sive furniture. I now first began to inhabit my house, 
I may say, when I began to use it for warmth as 
well as shelter. I had got a couple of old fire-dogs to 
keep the wood from the hearth, and it did me good to 
see the soot form on the back of the chimney which I 
had built, and I poked the fire with more right and more 
satisfaction than usual. My dwelling was small, and I 
could hardly entertain an echo in it; but it seemed larger 
for being a single apartment and remote from neighbors. 
All the attractions of a house were concentrated in one 
room; it was kitchen, chamber, parlor, and keeping- 
room ; and whatever satisfaction parent or child, master 
or servant, derive from living in a house, I enjoyed it 
all. Cato says, the master of a family (patremfamili- 
as) must have in his rustic villa “ cellam oleariam, vina- 
riam, dolia multa, uti lubeat caritatem expectare, et rei, 
et virtuti, et glorise erit,” that is, “ an oil and wine cellar, 
many casks, so that it may be pleasant to expect hard 
times; it will be for his advantage, and virtue, and 
glory.” I had in my cellar a firkin of potatoes, about 
two quarts of peas with the weevil in them, and on my 
shelf a little rice, a jug of molasses, and of rye and In¬ 
dian meal a peck each. 
I sometimes dream of a larger and more populous 
house, standing in a golden age, of enduring materials, 
and without ginger-bread work, which shall still consist 
of only one room, a vast, rude, substantial, primitive 
hall, without ceiling or plastering, with bare rafters and 
purlins supporting a sort of lower heaven over one’s 
head,—useful to keep off rain and snow; where the king 
