268 
WALDEN. 
my house and within my breast. My employment out 
of doors now was to collect the dead wood in the forest, 
bringing it in my hands or on my shoulders, or some¬ 
times trailing a dead pine tree under each arm to my 
shed. An old forest fence which had seen its best days 
was a great haul for me. I sacrificed it to Vulcan, for 
it was past serving the god Terminus. How much more 
interesting an event is that man’s supper who has just 
been forth in the snow to hunt, nay, you might say, steal, 
the fuel to cook it with! His bread and meat are sweet. 
There are enough fagots and waste wood of all kinds 
in the forests of most of our towns to support many fires, 
but which at present warm none, and, some think, hin¬ 
der the growth of the young wood. There was also the 
drift-wood of the pond. In the course of the summer I 
had discovered a raft of pitch-pine logs with the bark 
on, pinned together by the Irish when the railroad was 
built. This I hauled up partly on the shore. After 
soaking two years and then lying high six months it 
was perfectly sound, though waterlogged past drying. 
I amused myself one winter day with sliding this piece¬ 
meal across the pond, nearly half a mile, skating behind 
with one end of a log fifteen feet long on my shoulder, 
and the other on the ice; or I tied several logs together 
with a birch withe, and then, with a longer birch or al¬ 
der which had a hook at the end, dragged them across. 
Though completely waterlogged and almost as heavy 
as lead, they not only burned long, but made a very hot 
fire; nay, I thought that they burned better for the 
soaking, as if the pitch, being confined by the water, 
burned longer as in a lamp. 
Gilpin, in his account of the forest borderers of Eng¬ 
land, says that “ the encroachments of trespassers, and 
