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©CLA268876to learn how small were the actual needs of the body, and what the essential cost of living. He would test the pleasures and possible drawbacks of the plainest fare and a primitively simple dwelling.He coveted, too, the opportunity that would be afforded to study Nature find Thoreau, at the end of his first year's pondside residence, designing a lodge which Emerson proposed should occupy a ledge on the opposite shore where it would command a wide prospect westerly over the level country viii It was, however, not published until seven years after his experiment as a hermit ended. Like all his books, it contains much that is not in the least concerned with what is land roundabout still continues in the Emerson family, and its pine-clad slopes are freely open to the public. I fancy the aspect of the vicinity has not changed essentially. The woodland seclusion is almost as complete as it was in Thoreau's time.Even the railroad which skirts one end of the pond was there when he 10 WALDEN One farmer says to me, ''You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with;" and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones, walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plough along in spite of every obstacle. Some things are really necessaries of life in some circles, the most helpless and diseased, which in others are luxuries merely, and in others still are entirely unknown. 14 WALDEN this climate may, accurately enough, be distributed under the several heads of Food, Shelter, Clothing, and Fuel ; for not till we have secured these are we prepared to entertain the true problems of life with freedom and a prospect of success. Man has invented, not only houses, but clothes and cooked food; and possibly from the accidental discovery of the warmth of fire, and the consequent use of it, at first a luxury, arose the present necessity to sit by it. We observe cats and dogs acquiring the same second nature. By proper Shelter and Clothing we legitimately retain our own internal heat ; but with an excess of these, or of Fuel, that is, with an external heat greater than our 20 WALDEN of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men's, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature. I would gladly tell all that I know about it, and never paint "No Admittance" on my gate. I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselve...
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