EARLY SPRING IN MASSACHUSETTS. 115 
this sense I am not ambitious. I do not wish 
my native soil to become exhausted and run 
out through neglect. Only that traveling is 
good which reveals to me the value of home and 
enables me to enjoy it better. That man is the 
richest whose pleasures are the cheapest. 
It is strange that men are in such haste to 
get fame as teachers rather than knowledge as 
learners. 
March 11, 1857. I see and talk with Rice 
sawing off the ends of clapboards, which he has 
planed to make them square, for an addition to 
his house. He has a fire in his shop and plays 
at house-building there. His life is poetic. He 
does the work himself. He combines several 
qualities and talents rarely combined. Though 
he owns houses in the city whose repairs he at¬ 
tends to, finds tenants for them, and collects the 
rent, he also has his Sudbury farm and bean- 
field. Though he lived in a city, he would still 
be natural, and related to primitive nature 
around him. Though he owned all Beacon 
Street, you might find that his mittens were 
made of the skin of a woodchuck that had rav¬ 
aged his beanfield. I noticed a woodchuck’s 
skin tacked up to the inside of his shop. He 
said it had fatted on his beans and William had 
killed it, and expected to get another to make 
a pair of mittens of, one not being quite large 
