But As It Grew Colder Towards
Midnight, I At Length Encased Myself Completely In Boards,
Managing Even To Put A Board On Top Of Me, With A Large Stone On
It, To Keep It Down, And So Slept Comfortably.
I was reminded,
it is true, of the Irish children, who inquired what their
neighbors did who had no door to put over them in winter nights
as they had; but I am convinced that there was nothing very
strange in the inquiry.
Those who have never tried it can have
no idea how far a door, which keeps the single blanket down, may
go toward making one comfortable. We are constituted a good deal
like chickens, which taken from the hen, and put in a basket of
cotton in the chimney-corner, will often peep till they die,
nevertheless, but if you put in a book, or anything heavy, which
will press down the cotton, and feel like the hen, they go to
sleep directly. My only companions were the mice, which came to
pick up the crumbs that had been left in those scraps of paper;
still, as everywhere, pensioners on man, and not unwisely
improving this elevated tract for their habitation. They nibbled
what was for them; I nibbled what was for me. Once or twice in
the night, when I looked up, I saw a white cloud drifting through
the windows, and filling the whole upper story.
This observatory was a building of considerable size, erected by
the students of Williamstown College, whose buildings might be
seen by daylight gleaming far down in the valley. It would be no
small advantage if every college were thus located at the base of
a mountain, as good at least as one well-endowed professorship.
It were as well to be educated in the shadow of a mountain as in
more classical shades. Some will remember, no doubt, not only
that they went to the college, but that they went to the
mountain. Every visit to its summit would, as it were,
generalize the particular information gained below, and subject
it to more catholic tests.
I was up early and perched upon the top of this tower to see the
daybreak, for some time reading the names that had been engraved
there, before I could distinguish more distant objects. An
"untamable fly" buzzed at my elbow with the same nonchalance as
on a molasses hogshead at the end of Long Wharf. Even there I
must attend to his stale humdrum. But now I come to the pith of
this long digression. - As the light increased I discovered around
me an ocean of mist, which by chance reached up exactly to the
base of the tower, and shut out every vestige of the earth, while
I was left floating on this fragment of the wreck of a world, on
my carved plank, in cloudland; a situation which required no aid
from the imagination to render it impressive. As the light in
the east steadily increased, it revealed to me more clearly the
new world into which I had risen in the night, the new _terra
firma_ perchance of my future life.
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