Then Remembering That I Had
Passed A Moist Place Near The Top, On My Way Up, I Returned To
Find
It again, and here, with sharp stones and my hands, in the
twilight, I made a well about two feet
Deep, which was soon
filled with pure cold water, and the birds too came and drank at
it. So I filled my dipper, and, making my way back to the
observatory, collected some dry sticks, and made a fire on some
flat stones which had been placed on the floor for that purpose,
and so I soon cooked my supper of rice, having already whittled a
wooden spoon to eat it with.
I sat up during the evening, reading by the light of the fire the
scraps of newspapers in which some party had wrapped their
luncheon; the prices current in New York and Boston, the
advertisements, and the singular editorials which some had seen
fit to publish, not foreseeing under what critical circumstances
they would be read. I read these things at a vast advantage
there, and it seemed to me that the advertisements, or what is
called the business part of a paper, were greatly the best, the
most useful, natural, and respectable. Almost all the opinions
and sentiments expressed were so little considered, so shallow
and flimsy, that I thought the very texture of the paper must be
weaker in that part and tear the more easily. The advertisements
and the prices current were more closely allied to nature, and
were respectable in some measure as tide and meteorological
tables are; but the reading-matter, which I remembered was most
prized down below, unless it was some humble record of science,
or an extract from some old classic, struck me as strangely
whimsical, and crude, and one-idea'd, like a school-boy's theme,
such as youths write and after burn. The opinions were of that
kind that are doomed to wear a different aspect to-morrow, like
last year's fashions; as if mankind were very green indeed, and
would be ashamed of themselves in a few years, when they had
outgrown this verdant period. There was, moreover, a singular
disposition to wit and humor, but rarely the slightest real
success; and the apparent success was a terrible satire on the
attempt; the Evil Genius of man laughed the loudest at his best
jokes. The advertisements, as I have said, such as were serious,
and not of the modern quack kind, suggested pleasing and poetic
thoughts; for commerce is really as interesting as nature. The
very names of the commodities were poetic, and as suggestive as
if they had been inserted in a pleasing poem, - Lumber, Cotton,
Sugar, Hides, Guano, Logwood. Some sober, private, and original
thought would have been grateful to read there, and as much in
harmony with the circumstances as if it had been written on a
mountain-top; for it is of a fashion which never changes, and as
respectable as hides and logwood, or any natural product. What
an inestimable companion such a scrap of paper would have been,
containing some fruit of a mature life. What a relic! What a
recipe! It seemed a divine invention, by which not mere shining
coin, but shining and current thoughts, could be brought up and
left there.
As it was cold, I collected quite a pile of wood and lay down on
a board against the side of the building, not having any blanket
to cover me, with my head to the fire, that I might look after
it, which is not the Indian rule. 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.
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