262 
WALDEN. 
and queen posts stand out to receive your homage, when 
you have done reverence to the prostrate Saturn of an 
older dynasty on stepping over the sill; a cavernous 
house, wherein you must reach up a torch upon a pole 
to see the roof; where some may live in the fire-place, 
some in the recess of a window, and some on settles, some 
at one end of the hall, some at another, and some aloft 
on rafters with the spiders, if they choose; a house which 
you have got into when you have opened the outside 
door, and the ceremony is over; where the weary trav¬ 
eller may wash, and eat, and converse, and sleep, with¬ 
out further journey; such a shelter as you would be 
glad to reach in a tempestuous night, containing all the 
essentials of a house, and nothing for house-keeping; 
where you can see all the treasures of the house at one 
view, and every thing hangs upon its peg that a man 
should use; at once kitchen, pantry, parlor, chamber, 
store-house, and garret; where you can see so necessary 
a thing as a barrel or a ladder, so convenient a thing as a 
cupboard, and hear the pot boil, and pay your respects 
to the fire that cooks your dinner and the oven that 
bakes your bread, and the necessary furniture and uten¬ 
sils are the chief ornaments; where the washing is not 
put out, nor the fire, nor the mistress, and perhaps you 
are sometimes requested to move from off the trap-door, 
when the cook would descend into the cellar, and so learn 
whether the ground is solid or hollow beneath you without 
stamping. A house whose inside is as open and mani¬ 
fest as a bird’s nest, and you cannot go in at the front 
door and out at the back without seeing some of its in¬ 
habitants ; where to be a guest is to be presented with 
the freedom of the house, and not to be carefully ex¬ 
cluded from seven eighths of it, shut up in a particular 
