282 
WALDEN. 
were himself, upon his raised plank bed. His pipe lay 
broken on the hearth, instead of a bowl broken at the 
fountain. The last could never have been the symbol 
of his death, for he confessed to me that, though he had 
heard of Blister’s Spring, he had never seen it; and 
soiled cards, kings of diamonds spades and hearts, 
were scattered over the floor. One black chicken which 
the administrator could not catch, black as night and as 
silent, not even croaking, awaiting Reynard, still went 
to roost in the next apartment. In the rear there was 
the dim outline of a garden, which had been planted 
but had never received its first hoeing, owing to those 
terrible shaking fits, though it was now harvest time. 
It was over-run with Roman wormwood and beggar- 
ticks, which last stuck to my clothes for all fruit. The 
skin of a woodchuck was freshly stretched upon the 
back of the house, a trophy of his last Waterloo; but 
no warm cap or mittens would he want more. 
Now only a dent in the earth marks the site of these 
dwellings, with buried cellar stones, and strawberries, 
raspberries, thimble-berries, hazel-bushes, and sumachs 
growing in the sunny sward there; some pitch-pine or 
gnarled oak occupies what was the chimney nook, and 
a sweet-scented black-birch, perhaps, waves where the 
door-stone was. Sometimes the well dent is visible, 
where once a spring oozed ; now dry and tearless grass; 
or it was covered deep, — not to be discovered till some 
late day, -— with a flat stone under the sod, when the 
last of the race departed. What a sorrowful act must 
that be, — the covering up of wells ! coincident with the 
opening of wells of tears. These cellar dents, like de¬ 
serted fox burrows, old holes, are all that is left where 
once were the stir and bustle of human life, and “ fate, 
