under a pine,
piling boughs over my head, and wearing my handkerchief for a shed; and
when at length I had made one cast over the pickerelweed, standing up
to my middle in water, I found myself suddenly in the shadow of a cloud,
and the thunder began to rumble with such emphasis that I could do no
more than listen to it. The gods must be proud, thought I, with such
forked flashes to rout a poor unarmed fisherman. So I made haste for
shelter to the nearest hut, which stood half a mile from any road, but
so much the nearer to the pond, and had long been uninhabited:--

"And here a poet builded,
In the completed years,
For behold a trivial cabin
That to destruction steers."

So the Muse fables. But therein, as I found, dwelt now John Field, an
Irishman, and his wife, and several children, from the broad-faced boy
who assisted his father at his work, and now came running by his
side from the bog to escape the rain, to the wrinkled, sibyl-like,
cone-headed infant that sat upon its father's knee as in the palaces
of nobles, and looked out from its home in the midst of wet and hunger
inquisitively upon the stranger, with the privilege of infancy, not
knowing but it was the last of a noble line, and the hope and cynosure
of the world, instead of John Field's poor starveling brat. There we sat
together under that part of the roof which leaked the least, while it
showered and thundered without. I had sat there many times of old
before the ship was built that floated his family to America. An honest,
hard-working, but shiftless man plainly was John Field; and his wife,
she too was brave to cook so many successive dinners in the recesses of
that lofty stove; with round greasy face and bare breast, still thinking
to improve her condition one day; with the never absent mop in one hand,
and yet no effects of it visible anywhere. The chickens, which had also
taken shelter here from the rain, stalked about the room like members
of the family, too humanized, methought, to roast well. They stood and
looked in my eye or pecked at my shoe significantly. Meanwhile my
host told me his story, how hard he worked "bogging" for a neighboring
farmer, turning up a meadow with a spade or bog hoe at the rate of ten
dollars an acre and the use of the land with manure for one year, and
his little broad-faced son worked cheerfully at his father's side the
while, not knowing