ow and see if the house was not on
fire; it was the only time I remember to have been particularly anxious
on this score; so I looked and saw that a spark had caught my bed, and
I went in and extinguished it when it had burned a place as big as my
hand. But my house occupied so sunny and sheltered a position, and
its roof was so low, that I could afford to let the fire go out in the
middle of almost any winter day.

The moles nested in my cellar, nibbling every third potato, and making
a snug bed even there of some hair left after plastering and of brown
paper; for even the wildest animals love comfort and warmth as well as
man, and they survive the winter only because they are so careful to
secure them. Some of my friends spoke as if I was coming to the woods on
purpose to freeze myself. The animal merely makes a bed, which he warms
with his body, in a sheltered place; but man, having discovered fire,
boxes up some air in a spacious apartment, and warms that, instead of
robbing himself, makes that his bed, in which he can move about divested
of more cumbrous clothing, maintain a kind of summer in the midst of
winter, and by means of windows even admit the light, and with a lamp
lengthen out the day. Thus he goes a step or two beyond instinct, and
saves a little time for the fine arts. Though, when I had been exposed
to the rudest blasts a long time, my whole body began to grow torpid,
when I reached the genial atmosphere of my house I soon recovered my
faculties and prolonged my life. But the most luxuriously housed has
little to boast of in this respect, nor need we trouble ourselves to
speculate how the human race may be at last destroyed. It would be
easy to cut their threads any time with a little sharper blast from the
north. We go on dating from Cold Fridays and Great Snows; but a little
colder Friday, or greater snow would put a period to man's existence on
the globe.

The next winter I used a small cooking-stove for economy, since I
did not own the forest; but it did not keep fire so well as the open
fireplace. Cooking was then, for the most part, no longer a poetic, but
merely a chemic process. It will soon be forgotten, in these days of
stoves, that we used to roast potatoes in the ashes, after the Indian
fashion. The stove not only took up room and scented the house, but it
concealed the fire, and I felt as if I had lost a companion. You can
always see a face in the fire. The laborer, looking into it at eve