Nest Building Quotes

Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude

I will love you as a thief loves a gallery and as a crow loves a murder, as a cloud loves bats and as a range loves braes. I will love you as misfortune loves orphans, as fire loves innocence and as justice loves to sit and watch while everything goes wrong. I will love you as a battlefield loves young men and as peppermints love your allergies, and I will love you as the banana peel loves the shoe of a man who was just struck by a shingle falling off a house. I will love you as a volunteer fire department loves rushing into burning buildings and as burning buildings love to chase them back out, and as a parachute loves to leave a blimp and as a blimp operator loves to chase after it. I will love you as a dagger loves a certain person’s back, and as a certain person loves to wear dagger proof tunics, and as a dagger proof tunic loves to go to a certain dry cleaning facility, and how a certain employee of a dry cleaning facility loves to stay up late with a pair of binoculars, watching a dagger factory for hours in the hopes of catching a burglar, and as a burglar loves sneaking up behind people with binoculars, suddenly realizing that she has left her dagger at home. I will love you as a drawer loves a secret compartment, and as a secret compartment loves a secret, and as a secret loves to make a person gasp, and as a gasping person loves a glass of brandy to calm their nerves, and as a glass of brandy loves to shatter on the floor, and as the noise of glass shattering loves to make someone else gasp, and as someone else gasping loves a nearby desk to lean against, even if leaning against it presses a lever that loves to open a drawer and reveal a secret compartment. I will love you until all such compartments are discovered and opened, and until all the secrets have gone gasping into the world. I will love you until all the codes and hearts have been broken and until every anagram and egg has been unscrambled. I will love you until every fire is extinguised and until every home is rebuilt from the handsomest and most susceptible of woods, and until every criminal is handcuffed by the laziest of policemen. I will love until M. hates snakes and J. hates grammar, and I will love you until C. realizes S. is not worthy of his love and N. realizes he is not worthy of the V. I will love you until the bird hates a nest and the worm hates an apple, and until the apple hates a tree and the tree hates a nest, and until a bird hates a tree and an apple hates a nest, although honestly I cannot imagine that last occurrence no matter how hard I try. I will love you as we grow older, which has just happened, and has happened again, and happened several days ago, continuously, and then several years before that, and will continue to happen as the spinning hands of every clock and the flipping pages of every calendar mark the passage of time, except for the clocks that people have forgotten to wind and the calendars that people have forgotten to place in a highly visible area. I will love you as we find ourselves farther and farther from one another, where we once we were so close that we could slip the curved straw, and the long, slender spoon, between our lips and fingers respectively. I will love you until the chances of us running into one another slip from slim to zero, and until your face is fogged by distant memory, and your memory faced by distant fog, and your fog memorized by a distant face, and your distance distanced by the memorized memory of a foggy fog. I will love you no matter where you go and who you see, no matter where you avoid and who you don’t see, and no matter who sees you avoiding where you go. I will love you no matter what happens to you, and no matter how I discover what happens to you, and no matter what happens to me as I discover this, and now matter how I am discovered after what happens to me as I am discovering this.

You cannot keep birds from flying over your head but you can keep them from building a nest in your hair

That night, like every other night since I’d met her, I curled Grace into my arms, listening to her parents’ muffled movements in the living room. They were like busy little brainless birds, fluttering in and out of their nest at all hours of the day or night, so involved in the pleasure of nest building that they hadn’t noticed that it had been empty for years.

Let's scope the place out," he suggested, heading around the side of the building, "and be careful in the bushes." "Why?" Amy asked. "This is South Africa, dude," Dan replied. "Where cobras come from. And not the hot ones, like Ian.

I was so blessed. The first person I gave my heart to was an angel who plucked the feathers off his wings and built a nest for it.

My dear, I think of you always and at night I build myself a warm nest of things I remember and float in your sweetness till morning.

The tallest and oldest trees that seemed to have just have casually always been there, hold the greatest love: as it nurtures love for others: providing shade for two lovers, becoming home for birds to build a nest, and giving food to the squirrels whom scurry upon it.

Seeing me surrounded by paper towels on the floor, Morpheus lifts his eyebrows. "Building a nest?" he asks. "There's no need to start acting like a bird simply because you have a propensity for flying.

I don't mean what other people mean when they speak of a home, because I don't regard a home as a...well, as a place, a building...a house...of wood, bricks, stone. I think of a home as being a thing that two people have between them in which each can...well, nest.

A Chinese proverb reminds us: You cannot prevent birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can prevent them from building nests in your hair.

Her breast is fit for pearls, But I was not a "Diver" - Her brow is fit for thrones But I have not a crest, Her heart is fit for home- I- a Sparrow- build there Sweet of twigs and twine My perennial nest.

No young woman of means has gone through her entire life without at least once surveying her opportunities and wishing for a dragon instead.

No, you cannot stop the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can stop them from building nests in your hair.

But fate it a cunning hussy, and builds up her plans as imperceptibly as a bird builds her nest; and with the same kind of unconsidered trifles.

Owls hoot in B flat, cuckoos in D, but the water ousel sings in the voice of the stream. She builds her nest back of the waterfalls so the water is a lullaby to the little ones. Must be where they learn it.

There is nothing in which the birds differ more from man than the way in which they can build and yet leave a landscape as it was before.

A Robin said: The Spring will never come, And I shall never care to build again. A Rosebush said: These frosts are wearisome, My sap will never stir for sun or rain. The half Moon said: These nights are fogged and slow, I neither care to wax nor care to wane. The Ocean said: I thirst from long ago, Because earth's rivers cannot fill the main. — When Springtime came, red Robin built a nest, And trilled a lover's song in sheer delight. Grey hoarfrost vanished, and the Rose with might Clothed her in leaves and buds of crimson core. The dim Moon brightened. Ocean sunned his crest, Dimpled his blue, yet thirsted evermore.

The Politician's goal is to build a fortune, ours is to build our homeland flowering and strong. For her we will work and we will build. For her we will make each Romanian a hero, ready to fight, ready to sacrifice, ready to die.

How can I be kind? How can I find bird-relief in the nest-building of day-to-day? Necessity supplies no velvet wing with which to escape. I am indeed and mortally pierced with the seeds of love.

Just because a bird builds a nest doesn’t mean its wings are clipped,

Would a bird build its nest if it did not have its instinct for confidence in the world?

When we are afraid of ourselves and afraid of the seeming threat the world presents, then we become extremely selfish. We want to build our own little nests, our own cocoons, so that we can live by ourselves in a secure way.

Martin Luther said, “You cannot keep birds from flying over your head but you can keep them from building a nest in your hair.” You can’t keep the Devil from suggesting thoughts, but you can choose not to dwell or act on them.

Weaknesses were a human invention. They called it your weakness if they fantasized about murdering you with it.

It is not proven that Elizabeth's person equilibrium was set off balance by the slant of the office floor, nor could it be proven that it was Elizabeth who pushed the building off its foundations, but it is undeniable that they began to slip at about the same time.

That the birds of worry and care fly over you head, this you cannot change, but that they build nests in your hair, this you can prevent." - Chinese Proverb

So I build my own nest and feather it with thoughts of you.

The Clock on the Morning Lenape Building Must Clocks be circles? Time is not a circle. Suppose the Mother of All Minutes started right here, on the sidewalk in front of the Morning Lenape Building, and the parade of minutes that followed--each of them, say, one inch long-- headed out that way, down Bridge Street. Where would Now be? This minute? Out past the moon? Jupiter? The nearest star? Who came up with minutes, anyway? Who needs them? Name one good thing a minute's ever done. They shorten fun and measure misery. Get rid of them, I say. Down with minutes! And while you're at it--take hours with you too. Don't get me started on them. Clocks--that's the problem. Every clock is a nest of minutes and hours. Clocks strap us into their shape. Instead of heading for the nearest star, all we do is corkscrew. Clocks lock us into minutes, make Ferris wheel riders of us all, lug us round and round from number to number, dice the time of our lives into tiny bits until the bits are all we know and the only question we care to ask is "What time is it?" As if minutes could tell. As if Arnold could look up at this clock on the Lenape Building and read: 15 Minutes till Found. As if Charlie's time is not forever stuck on Half Past Grace. As if a swarm of stinging minutes waits for Betty Lou to step outside. As if love does not tell all the time the Huffelmeyers need to know.

There is some of the same fitness in a man's building his own house that there is in a bird's building its own nest. Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged? But alas! we do like cowbirds and cuckoos, which lay their eggs in nests which other birds have built, and cheer no traveller with their chattering and unmusical notes. Shall we forever resign the pleasure of construction to the carpenter?

Dan's skin was beginning to lose color. "Oh, har-har. A library, right? Just to make me crazy. 'Cause there's no reason we would go to a library. Right? I mean, we don't need to research Peoria, do we?" Amy began heading for the building. "Not Peoria. Something else." "Not funny, Amy!" Dan called as she pushed open the heavy brass doors. "Amy...Amy?

Missing, however, are nearly all fauna adapted to us. The seemingly invincible cockroach, a tropical import, long ago froze in unheated apartment buildings. Without garbage, rats starved or became lunch for the raptors nesting in burnt-out skyscrapers.

Lack of Faith" Yes, even when I don’t believe— there is a place in me inaccessible to unbelief, a patch of wild grace, a stubborn preserve, impenetrable, pain untouched by the sleeping body, music that builds its nest in silence.

I cannot bear that chirpy Bobby Kennedy, always building his beaver's nest with a few more facts. He needs to look into the abyss.

All Shesheshen could do for Homily was be patient with her, and make space for her, and eventually, one day behind her back, eat her mother.

The peace of Manderley. The quietude and the grace. Whoever lived within its walls, whatever trouble there was and strife, however much uneasiness and pain, no matter what tears were shed, what sorrows borne, the peace of Manderley could not be broken or the loveliness destroyed. The flowers that died would bloom again another year, the same birds build their nests, the same trees blossom. That old quiet moss smell would linger in the air, and the bees would come, and crickets, the herons build their nests in the deep dark woods. The butterflies would dance their merry jug across the lawns, and spiders spin foggy webs, and small startled rabbits who had no business to come trespassing poke their faces through the crowded shrubs. There would be lilac, and honeysuckle still, and the white magnolia buds unfolding slow and tight beneath the dining-room window. No one would ever hurt Manderley. It would lie always in its hollow like an enchanted thing, guarded by the woods, safe, secure, while the sea broke and ran and came again in the little shingle bays below.

My head was a desolate place and as barren as the bare hills of Le Marche. Until I began to build in it, only vultures nested there.

The birds looked upon me as nothing but a man, quite a trifling creature without wings—and they would have nothing to do with me. Were it not so I would build a small cabin for myself among their crowd of nests and pass my days counting the sea waves.

In this dark and wounded society, writing can give you the pleasures of the woodpecker, of hollowing out a hole in a tree where you can build your nest and say, “This is my niche, this is where I live now, this is where I belong.

O'er thee, like thine own sea birds I'll circle without rest For me earth holds no corner To build a lasting nest.

Martin Luther supposedly said, “You might not be able to stop the birds from landing on your head, but you can keep them from building a nest in your hair.

[...]for hatred was the fear people let themselves enjoy.

... Humans turn the places they live into great crowded piles of mud and stone, like the nests termites build--but what happens when in all the world there are only termite hills left but no bush?

The disorder in Yashar's apartment was that comfortable littering and stacking that only another writer can recognize as order - the considered scatter of papers and books a writer builds around himself until it acquires the cozy solidity of a nest.

Hide the miles between us Run to me Like you run your Fingers through my hair Desire in every digit, in every touch. Run to me Like rivers run in springtime Filled with renewing love As they do with the melting snow. Fly to me As the birds fly the continents Committed to build their nests. Fly to me As a cottonwood fluff in the air All over me, head to toe, gently Come here.

Just because birds fly over your head, doesn`t mean you have to give them a place to build a nest.

They say, you cannot stop the birds of sorrow, but you can prevent them from building a nest in your hair.

Romance was awful. She couldn't even murder people anymore.

Homily professed her love by digging a second crossbow bolt of Shersheshin's body. It was so much clearer a declaration of affection than any of those speeches spun by poets or playwrights. And stuffed into the mouths of actors who pretended to be enamored. One could only pretend to love in language. True love was a woman sinking up to her elbows in her viscera.

Unfortunately, most of today’s women resemble bowerbirds that force suitors to build elaborate nests of twigs, leaves, and discarded garbage before choosing a mate. Any male who doesn’t meet her standards doesn’t get to mate that year; one assumes he just stays in his bower, reads bower manuals, and watches bowerbird porn.

As the instinctual nature of the bird dictates the building of a nest, so the instinctual nature of the in-love experience pushes us to do outlandish and unnatural things for each other.

From above, the entire plan of Kuhawk looks like a bird’s nest; the globe looks like a gem at the center. It’s quiet. Except for the times when music happens. Like now— One room in the two-story building glows, violin music emanating from it. Maroc is playing for his master: The Roar of Death Sonata, 1st Movement, one of the legendary Eleven Pieces composed after the Apocalypse.

I know I sound a little crazy when I say that, but really, you get a glimpse of these bugs as they go about their lives, almost mechanical in how they follow their instincts, you see them breeding, eating, building nests, and dying, and you see how they just saturate every aspect of our existence, in the air, the dark corners, the insides of the walls, they eat our dead. I can’t sense them, but there’re skin mites all over our bodies and in our eyelashes… I guess it takes me out of myself when I think about it, reminds me that we’re only one part of this vast system, we’re cogs in the universe, in our own way. Seeing the little details makes me feel like the big problems aren’t so personal, they aren’t as overwhelming.

my mother the sparrow my mother the nest my mother the branches my mother the leaves my mother the tree who cut and whittled herself to build me a boat offering safe passage my eyes watch our slow sailing reflection in the water in its stillness, it's almost impossible to tell if the tiny yellow lights scattered across its surface are mirrored stars or crocodile eyes

But do you know how you should live? Like that crow that has built a nest on that palm tree. When it knows it is going to lay eggs, it builds its nest. Then it incubates the eggs and hatches them. It finds food for the little ones and takes care of them until they grow their own wings. Once that happens, what do you think is the relationship between the baby crow and its mother? They go their separate ways. “You got your wings, now get out of here, and fend for yourself.” That’s the way to live. Instead, we give birth, raise them, get them married, save money and struggle. Is this any way to live? If we were more like crows and cuckoos, I’d also like to have children.

Spring is the only season that flutters in on gentle wings and builds nests in our hearts.

Where the strong are weak, and the noble all too mild—there it builds its disgusting nest: the parasite lives where the great have small wounded recesses.

Peace is bald eagle Flying and flying over the trees In search for a spot Under the blue sky To build her nest to care.

Basic Instincts It’s the way mother birds build nests, and build them high enough to elude

You cannot stop the birds of sadness from flying over your head, but you can stop them from building nests in your hair.

This was the same mistake so many humans made: believing someone would leap over trauma when it hurt them badly enough.

Nobody actually helped each other. That's why people had religions, hoping gods would provide help where people refused.

Shesheshen wrapped her arms around Homily and held her to her chest for a moment, mourning the realization that she'd fallen in love with someone's pain.

We don't use the words begetting or begotten much in modern English, but everyone still knows what they mean. To beget is to become the father of: to create is to make. And the difference is this. When you beget, you beget something o the same kind as yourself. A man begets human babies, a beaver begets little beavers and a bird begets eggs which turn into little birds. But when you make, you make something of a different kind from yourself. A bird makes a nest, a beaver builds a dam, a man makes a wireless set – or he may make something more like himself than a wireless set: say, a statue. If he is clever enough carver he may make a statue which is very like man indeed. But, of course, it is not a ream man; it only looks like one. It cannot breathe or think. It is not alive. Now that is the first thing to get clear. What God begets is God; just as what man begets is man. What God creates is not God; just as what man makes is not man. That is why men are not Son's of God in the sense that Christ is. They may be like God in certain ways, but they are not things of the same kind. They are more like statues or pictures of God.

I do not know what you call it. The thing that is not flesh or bone or organs. In the panic, I needed to make sure the greater things were safe... What do you call that thing that I had to save? I had to save it. I had to save us. You are my safety.

Everything is temporary, almost like a passing fase, some of laughter Some of pain. What we would do, If we had the chance to explore What we had taken for Granted the very day before, Some would say I'm selfish, To hold a little sadness in my eyes, But they don't feel the sorrow When I can't do, all that helps me feel alive. I can express my emotions, but I can't run wild and free, My mind and soul would handle it but hell upon my hip, ankle and knees, This disorder came about, as a friendship said its last goodbyes, Soooo this is what I got given for all the years I stood by? I finally stand still to question it, life it is in fact? What the fuck is the purpose of it all if you get stabbed in the back? And after the anger fills the air, the regret takes it places, I never wanted to be that girl, Horrid, sad and faded... So I took with a grain of salt, my new found reality, I am not of my pain, the disability doesnt define me. I find away to adjust, also with the absence of my friend, I trust the choices I make, allow my heart to mend. I pick up the pieces I retrain my leg, I find where I left off And I start all over again, You see what happens... When a warrior gets tested; They grow from the ashes Powerful and invested. So I thank all this heartache, As I put it to a rest, I move forward with my life And I'll build a damn good nest.

Tenderness can be born only of respect for individualities. Tenderness builds its nest in little things, in the absurdities of a face, in personal crotchets. When we lose a friend, it is probably his faults that we mourn.

At times, feeling the wind on my brow, I went numb with horror. In my imagination I saw armies of ants and cockroaches calling to one another and scurrying toward my head, to some place under the top of my skull, where they would build new nests. There they would proliferate and eat out my thoughts, one after another, until I would become as empty as the shell of a pumpkin from which all the fruit has been scraped out.

We make a home for ourselves, every time we work on something: actors, writers, singers, building these little nests in our gypsy souls, in place of the ones we so seldom seem to make in our own lives. And then suddenly it's over, and we have to start again.

...it obeys none of the natural laws of hereditary and environmental change, pays no attention to the survival of the fittest, positively sneers at any attempt on the part of man to work out a rational life cycle, is possibly immortal, unquestionably immoral, evidences anabolism but not katabolism, ruts, spawns, and breeds but does not reproduce, lays no eggs, builds no nests, seeks but does not find, wanders but does not rest.

We each want nothing more than to live for the moment. Nature hardwired us perpetually to follow the call of the wild, cull all the highs in life, and rejoice in life by dancing, singing, jumping, building nests, creating beauty, and playing with our young. We each find ourselves happiest when we are engaging in conduct that makes us feel alive.

They say that people never get over their first real love. That it builds a nest deep in their body memory.

The bird and the fish may fall in love but where will they build their nest?

Just as the migratory and nest-building instincts of birds were never learnt or acquired individually, man brings with him at birth the ground-plan of his nature, and not only of his individual nature but of his collective nature. These inherited systems correspond to the human situations that have existed since primeval times: youth and old age, birth and death, sons and daughters, father and mothers, mating, and so on. Only the individual consciousness experiences these things for the first time, but not the bodily system and the unconscious.

Read History: thus learn how small a space You may inhabit, nor inhabit long In crowding Cosmos -- in that confined place Work boldly; build your flimsy barriers strong; Turn round and round, make warm your nest; among The other hunting beasts, keep heart and face, -- Not to betray the doomed and splendid race You are so proud of, to which you belong. For trouble comes to all of us: the rat Has courage, in adversity, to fight; But what a shining animal is man, Who knows, when pain subsides, that is not that, For worse than that must follow -- yet can write Music; can laugh; play tennis; even plan.

When I was younger I used to see the earth as a fundamentally stable and serene place, possessed of a delicate, nearly divine balance, which humans had somehow managed to upset. But as I studied trails more closely, this fantasy gradually evaporated. I now see the earth as the collaborative artwork of trillions of sculptors, large and small. Sheep, humans, elephants, ants: each of us alters the world in our passage. When we build hives or nests, mud huts or concrete towers, we re-sculpt the contours of the planet. When we eat, we convert living matter into waste. And when we walk, we create trails. The question we must ask ourselves is not whether we should shape the earth, but how.

Male rats don’t experience the hormonal changes that trigger maternal behavior in female rats. They never normally participate in infant care. Yet put a baby rat in a cage with a male adult and after a few days he will be caring for the baby almost as if he were its mother. He’ll pick it up, nestle it close to him as a nursing female would, keep the baby rat clean and comforted, and even build a comfy nest for it.29 The parenting circuits are there in the male brain, even in a species in which paternal care doesn’t normally exist.30 If a male rat, without even the aid of a William Sears baby-care manual, can be inspired to parent then I would suggest that the prospects for human fathers are pretty good.

Indeed, a bird is made in such a way that it can fly, gather food and build a nest, and when I see a bird doing these things I rejoice. Goats, hares and wolves are made in order to eat, multiply and feed their families, and when they do this I feel quite sure that they are happy and that their lives are meaningful. What should a man do? He too must work for his existence, just as the animals do, but with the difference that he will perish if he does it alone, for he must work for an existence, not just for himself, but for everyone. And when he does this I feel quite sure that he is happy and that his life has meaning. And what had I been doing for all those thirty years of conscious life? Far from working for an existence for everyone, I had not even done so for myself. I had lived as a parasite and when I asked myself why I lived, I received the answer: for nothing. If the meaning of human existence lies in working to procure it I had spent thirty years attempting, not to procure it, but to destroy it for myself and for others. How then could I get any answer other than that my life is evil and meaningless? Indeed it was evil and meaningless.

He welcomes the chance to do fatherly things with the little girl, and those ten morning minutes with dear little four-year-old Ruby, with her deep soulful eyes, and the wondrous things she sees with them, and her deep soulful voice, and the precious though not entirely memorable things she says with it, and the smell of baby shampoo and breakfast cereal filling the car, that little shimmering capsule of time is like listening to cello music in the morning, or watching birds in a flutter of industry building a nest, it simply reminds you that even if God is dead, or never existed in the first place, there is, nevertheless, something tender at the center of creation, some meaning, some purpose and poetry.

How could anarchy be any worse for the general welfare than this? I say let the city go bankrupt, the buildings fall, let grass take over Fifth Avenue. Let birds nest in storefronts, whales swim up the Hudson. We can spend mornings hunting for food, and afternoons fornicating, and at night we’ll dance on the rooftops and chant shantih shantih at the sky.

Such a staircase, with its accessories, in the older and more crowded parts of Paris, would be bad enough now; but, at that time, it was vile indeed to unaccustomed and unhardened senses. Every little habitation within the great foul nest of one high building—that is to say, the room or rooms within every door that opened on the general staircase—left its own heap of refuse on its own landing, besides flinging other refuse from its own windows. The uncontrollable and hopeless mass of decomposition so engendered, would have polluted the air, even if poverty and deprivation had not loaded it with their intangible impurities; the two bad sources combined made it almost insupportable. Through such an atmosphere, by a steep dark shaft of dirt and poison, the way lay.

We cleave our way through the mountains until the interstate dips into a wide basin brimming with blue sky, broken by dusty roads and rocky saddles strung out along the southern horizon. This is our first real glimpse of the famous big-sky country to come, and I couldn't care less. For all its grandeur, the landscape does not move me. And why should it? The sky may be big, it may be blue and limitless and full of promise, but it's also really far away. Really, it's just an illusion. I've been wasting my time. We've all been wasting our time. What good is all this grandeur if it's impermanent, what good all of this promise if it's only fleeting? Who wants to live in a world where suffering is the only thing that lasts, a place where every single thing that ever meant the world to you can be stripped away in an instant? And it will be stripped away, so don't fool yourself. If you're lucky, your life will erode slowly with the ruinous effects of time or recede like the glaciers that carved this land, and you will be left alone to sift through the detritus. If you are unlucky, your world will be snatched out from beneath you like a rug, and you'll be left with nowhere to stand and nothing to stand on. Either way, you're screwed. So why bother? Why grunt and sweat and weep your way through the myriad obstacles, why love, dream, care, when you're only inviting disaster? I'm done answering the call of whippoorwills, the call of smiling faces and fireplaces and cozy rooms. You won't find me building any more nests among the rose blooms. Too many thorns.

I would revisit them all in the long course of my waking dream: rooms in winter, where on going to bed I would at once bury my head in a nest, built up out of the most diverse materials, the corner of my pillow, the top of my blankets, a piece of a shawl, the edge of my bed, and a copy of an evening paper, all of which things I would contrive, with the infinite patience of birds building their nests, to cement into one whole; rooms where, in a keen frost, I would feel the satisfaction of being shut in from the outer world (like the sea-swallow which builds at the end of a dark tunnel and is kept warm by the surrounding earth), and where, the fire keeping in all night, I would sleep wrapped up.

Of those few fools, who with ill stars are curst, Sure scribbling fools, called poets, fare the worst: For they're a sort of fools which fortune makes, And, after she has made them fools, forsakes. With Nature's oafs 'tis quite a different case, For Fortune favours all her idiot race. In her own nest the cuckoo eggs we find, Over which she broods to hatch the changeling kind: No portion for her own she has to spare, So much she dotes on her adopted care. Poets are bubbles, by the town drawn in, Suffered at first some trifling stakes to win: But what unequal hazards do they run! Each time they write they venture all they've won: The Squire that's buttered still, is sure to be undone. This author, heretofore, has found your favour, But pleads no merit from his past behaviour. To build on that might prove a vain presumption, Should grant to poets made admit resumption, And in Parnassus he must lose his seat, If that be found a forfeited estate.

THOSE BORN UNDER Pacific Northwest skies are like daffodils: they can achieve beauty only after a long, cold sulk in the rain. Henry, our mother, and I were Pacific Northwest babies. At the first patter of raindrops on the roof, a comfortable melancholy settled over the house. The three of us spent dark, wet days wrapped in old quilts, sitting and sighing at the watery sky. Viviane, with her acute gift for smell, could close her eyes and know the season just by the smell of the rain. Summer rain smelled like newly clipped grass, like mouths stained red with berry juice — blueberries, raspberries, blackberries. It smelled like late nights spent pointing constellations out from their starry guises, freshly washed laundry drying outside on the line, like barbecues and stolen kisses in a 1932 Ford Coupe. The first of the many autumn rains smelled smoky, like a doused campsite fire, as if the ground itself had been aflame during those hot summer months. It smelled like burnt piles of collected leaves, the cough of a newly revived chimney, roasted chestnuts, the scent of a man’s hands after hours spent in a woodshop. Fall rain was not Viviane’s favorite. Rain in the winter smelled simply like ice, the cold air burning the tips of ears, cheeks, and eyelashes. Winter rain was for hiding in quilts and blankets, for tying woolen scarves around noses and mouths — the moisture of rasping breaths stinging chapped lips. The first bout of warm spring rain caused normally respectable women to pull off their stockings and run through muddy puddles alongside their children. Viviane was convinced it was due to the way the rain smelled: like the earth, tulip bulbs, and dahlia roots. It smelled like the mud along a riverbed, like if she opened her mouth wide enough, she could taste the minerals in the air. Viviane could feel the heat of the rain against her fingers when she pressed her hand to the ground after a storm. But in 1959, the year Henry and I turned fifteen, those warm spring rains never arrived. March came and went without a single drop falling from the sky. The air that month smelled dry and flat. Viviane would wake up in the morning unsure of where she was or what she should be doing. Did the wash need to be hung on the line? Was there firewood to be brought in from the woodshed and stacked on the back porch? Even nature seemed confused. When the rains didn’t appear, the daffodil bulbs dried to dust in their beds of mulch and soil. The trees remained leafless, and the squirrels, without acorns to feed on and with nests to build, ran in confused circles below the bare limbs. The only person who seemed unfazed by the disappearance of the rain was my grandmother. Emilienne was not a Pacific Northwest baby nor a daffodil. Emilienne was more like a petunia. She needed the water but could do without the puddles and wet feet. She didn’t have any desire to ponder the gray skies. She found all the rain to be a bit of an inconvenience, to be honest.

On Sunday, a lambent crevice opened up in the street outside my house, By Tuesday birds were flying into it. "I probably won't miss you," my mother said, "I'm only interested in the end of the world," I replied. Many find it difficult to breath without the atmosphere but we knew how. We just stopped breathing. We're at the Moonlite All-Nite Dinner and they're serving up fruit from the plants growing out of the waitress. The CLOSED sign whispers, "Please, don't touch me." We watch bodies fall to the ground outside like deep-sea creatures surfacing. You turn to me and ask, "Do you ever think about suicide?" I look away from you and close my eyes, eat the raspberries to confuse the blood in my mouth. Now you're in the only car in the parking lot at midnight and you're watching me throw stones at the moon, which hangs low in the sky so he can look into your house. Your sister tried to touch him from her bedroom window once, and he flinched; now he and the oceans watch her with a quiet concern. The lilac sky is trying to rest her head on his shoulder, all trees gradually growing through her. A hummingbird whispers to you, "Be careful, under her dress is her skin," and then builds his nest in the middle of the highway, I look back at you, and you close your eyes.

A caged bird in spring knows perfectly well that there is some way in which he should be able to serve. He is well aware that there is something to be done, but he is unable to do it. What is it? He cannot quite remember, but then he gets a vague inkling and he says to himself, “The others are building their nests and hatching their young and bringing them up,” and then he bangs his head against the bars of the cage. But the cage does not give way and the bird is maddened by pain. “What a idler,” says another bird passing by - what an idler. Yet the prisoner lives and does not die. There are no outward signs of what is going on inside him; he is doing well, he is quite cheerful in the sunshine. But then the season of the great migration arrives, an attack of melancholy. He has everything he needs, say the children who tend him in his cage - but he looks out, at the heavy thundery sky, and in his heart of hearts he rebels against his fate. I am caged, I am caged and you say I need nothing, you idiots! I have everything I need, indeed! Oh! please give me the freedom to be a bird like other birds!

He pretended optimism every time Jack had a new trick up his sleeve, quietly paying off lines of credit that never materialized into revenue because that was what you did when you loved someone, when you were building a life together. Your strengths compensated for their weaknesses. You became the grounding leverage to their impulses, ego to their id. You accommodated. And if Walker got impatient, if he sometimes wished things were a little more balanced, he would just imagine his life without Jack and recalibrate, because he couldn’t imagine life without Jack.

And how easy it was to leave this life, after all - this life that could feel so present and permanent that departing from it must seem to require a tear into a different dimension. There the bunch of them were, young hopefuls, decorating their annually purged dorm rooms with postcards and prints and favorite photographs of friends, filling them with hot pots and dried flowers, throw rugs and stereos. Houseplants, a lamp, maybe some furniture brought up by encouraging parents. They nested there like miniature grownups. As if this provisional student life - with its brushfire friendships and drink-addled intimacies, its gorging on knowledge and blind sexual indulgences - could possibly last. As if it were a home, of any kind at all: someplace to gather one's sense of self. Flannery had never felt for a minute that these months of shared living took place on anything other than quicksand, and it had given this whole year (these scant seven or eight months, into which an aging decade or so had been condensed) a sliding, wavery feel. She came from earthquake country and knew the dangers of building on landfill. That was, it seemed to Flannery, the best description of this willed group project of freshman year: construction on landfill. A collective confusion of impressions and tendencies, mostly castoffs with a few keepers. What was there to count on in any of it? What structure would remain, founded on that?

Those same three factors applied to human beings. Like bees, our ancestors were (1) territorial creatures with a fondness for defensible nests (such as caves) who (2) gave birth to needy offspring that required enormous amounts of care, which had to be given while (3) the group was under threat from neighboring groups. For hundreds of thousands of years, therefore, conditions were in place that pulled for the evolution of ultrasociality, and as a result, we are the only ultrasocial primate. The human lineage may have started off acting very much like chimps,48 but by the time our ancestors started walking out of Africa, they had become at least a little bit like bees. And much later, when some groups began planting crops and orchards, and then building granaries, storage sheds, fenced pastures, and permanent homes, they had an even steadier food supply that had to be defended even more vigorously. Like bees, humans began building ever more elaborate nests, and in just a few thousand years, a new kind of vehicle appeared on Earth—the city-state, able to raise walls and armies.49 City-states and, later, empires spread rapidly across Eurasia, North Africa, and Mesoamerica, changing many of the Earth’s ecosystems and allowing the total tonnage of human beings to shoot up from insignificance at the start of the Holocene (around twelve thousand years ago) to world domination today.50 As the colonial insects did to the other insects, we have pushed all other mammals to the margins, to extinction, or to servitude. The analogy to bees is not shallow or loose. Despite their many differences, human civilizations and beehives are both products of major transitions in evolutionary history. They are motorboats.

At Last At last, when all the summer shine That warmed life’s early hours is past, Your loving fingers seek for mine And hold them close—at last—at last! Not oft the robin comes to build Its nest upon the leafless bough By autumn robbed, by winter chilled,— But you, dear heart, you love me now. Though there are shadows on my brow And furrows on my cheek, in truth,— The marks where Time’s remorseless plough Broke up the blooming sward of Youth,— Though fled is every girlish grace Might win or hold a lover’s vow, Despite my sad and faded face, And darkened heart, you love me now! I count no more my wasted tears; They left no echo of their fall; I mourn no more my lonesome years; This blessed hour atones for all. I fear not all that Time or Fate May bring to burden heart or brow,— Strong in the love that came so late, Our souls shall keep it always now! Do not hesitate to walk into the life with love

Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged? But alas! we do like cowbirds and cuckoos, which lay their eggs in nests which other birds have built, and cheer no traveller with their chattering and unmusical notes. Shall we forever resign the pleasure of construction to the carpenter? What does architecture amount to in the experience of the mass of men? I never in all my walks came across a man engaged in so simple and natural an occupation as building his house. We belong to the community. It is not the tailor alone who is the ninth part of a man; it is as much the preacher, and the merchant, and the farmer. Where is this division of labor to end? and what object does it finally serve? No doubt another may also think for me; but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself.

Spring Lane burned with a mythology of chipped slates, pale wash-water blue and flaking at the seam. The summer yellow glow of an impending dawn diffused, diluted in the million-gallon sky above the tannery that occupied this low end of the ancient gradient, across the narrow street from where Phyllis and Michael stood outside the alley-mouth. The tannery’s high walls of browning brick with rusted wire mess over its high windows didn’t have the brutal aura that the building had down in the domain of the living. Rather it was softly iridescent with a sheen of fond remembrance – the cloisters of some mediaeval craft since disappeared – and had the homely perfume of manure and boiled sweets. Past the peeling wooden gates that lolled skew-whiff were yards where puddles stained a vivid tangerine harboured reflected chimney stacks, lamp black and wavering. Heaped leather shavings tinted with corrosive sapphire stood between the fire-opal pools, an azure down mounded into fantastic nests by thunderbirds to hatch their legendary fledglings. Rainspouts eaten through by time had diamond dribble beading on their chapped tin lips, and every splinter and subsided cobble sang with endless being. Michael Warren stood entranced and Phyllis Painter stood beside him, sharing his enchantment, looking at the heart-caressing vista through his eyes. The district’s summer sounds were, in her ears, reduced to a rich stock. The lengthy intervals between the bumbling drones of distant motorcars, the twittering filigree of birdsong strung along the guttered eaves, the silver gurgle of a buried torrent echoing deep in the night-throat of a drain, all these were boiled down to a single susurrus, the hissing tingling reverberation of a cymbal struck by a soft brush. The instant jingled in the breeze.

How To Make A Human Take the cat out of the sphinx and what is left? Riddle Me That. Take the horse from the centaur and you take away the sleek grace, the strength of harnessed power. What is left can still run across fields, after a fashion, but is easily winded; what is left will therefore erect buildings to divide the open plains so he no longer must face the wide expanse where once his equine legs raced the winds and, sometimes, won. Take the bull from the Minotaur but what is left will still assemble a herd for the sake of ruling over it. What is left will kill for sport, in an arena thronged with spectators shouting "Ole" at each deadly thrust. Take the fish from the Merman: What is left can still swim, if only with lots of splashing; gone is the sleek sliding through the waves, alert to the subtle changes in the current. What is left will build ships so he can cross the oceans without getting his feet wet, what is left won't care if his boats pollute the seas he can no longer breathe so long as their passage can keep him from sinking. Take the goat from the satyr but what is left will dance out of reach before you have the chance to get that Dionysian streak of myschief, the love of music and wine, the rutting parts that like to party all the day through. What is left will still be stubborn and refuse to give way; what is left will lock horns and butt heads with anyone who challenges him. Take the bird from the harpy, but the memory of flying, a constant yearning ache for skies so tantalizingly distant, will still remain, as will the established pecking orders, the bitter squabbling over food and territory, and the magpie eye that lusts for shining objects. What is left will cut down the whole forest to feather his sprawling urban nest. At the end of these operations, tell me: what is left? The answer: Man, a creature divorced from nature, who's forgotten where he came from.

They [mountains] are portions of the heart of the earth that have escaped from the dungeon down below, and rushed up and out. For the heart of the earth is a great wallowing mass, not of blood, as in the hearts of men and animals, but of glowing hot melted metals and stones. And as our hearts keep us alive, so that great lump of heat keeps the earth alive: it is a huge power of buried sunlight—that is what it is. Now think: out of that caldron, where all the bubbles would be as big as the Alps if it could get room for its boiling, certain bubbles have bubbled out and escaped—up and away, and there they stand in the cool, cold sky—mountains. Think of the change, and you will no more wonder that there should be something awful about the very look of a mountain: from the darkness—for where the light has nothing to shine upon, it is much the same as darkness—from the heat, from the endless tumult of boiling unrest—up, with a sudden heavenward shoot, into the wind, and the cold, and the starshine, and a cloak of snow that lies like ermine above the blue-green mail of the glaciers; and the great sun, their grandfather, up there in the sky; and their little old cold aunt, the moon, that comes wandering about the house at night; and everlasting stillness, except for the wind that turns the rocks and caverns into a roaring organ for the young archangels that are studying how to let out the pent-up praises of their hearts, and the molten music of the streams, rushing ever from the bosoms of the glaciers fresh-born. Think too of the change in their own substance—no longer molten and soft, heaving and glowing, but hard and shining and cold. Think of the creatures scampering over and burrowing in it, and the birds building their nests upon it, and the trees growing out of its sides, like hair to clothe it, and the lovely grass in the valleys, and the gracious flowers even at the very edge of its armour of ice, like the rich embroidery of the garment below, and the rivers galloping down the valleys in a tumult of white and green! And along with all these, think of the terrible precipices down which the traveller may fall and be lost, and the frightful gulfs of blue air cracked in the glaciers, and the dark profound lakes, covered like little arctic oceans with floating lumps of ice. All this outside the mountain! But the inside, who shall tell what lies there? Caverns of awfullest solitude, their walls miles thick, sparkling with ores of gold or silver, copper or iron, tin or mercury, studded perhaps with precious stones—perhaps a brook, with eyeless fish in it, running, running ceaseless, cold and babbling, through banks crusted with carbuncles and golden topazes, or over a gravel of which some of the stones are rubies and emeralds, perhaps diamonds and sapphires—who can tell?—and whoever can't tell is free to think—all waiting to flash, waiting for millions of ages—ever since the earth flew off from the sun, a great blot of fire, and began to cool. Then there are caverns full of water, numbing cold, fiercely hot—hotter than any boiling water. From some of these the water cannot get out, and from others it runs in channels as the blood in the body: little veins bring it down from the ice above into the great caverns of the mountain's heart, whence the arteries let it out again, gushing in pipes and clefts and ducts of all shapes and kinds, through and through its bulk, until it springs newborn to the light, and rushes down the mountain side in torrents, and down the valleys in rivers—down, down, rejoicing, to the mighty lungs of the world, that is the sea, where it is tossed in storms and cyclones, heaved up in billows, twisted in waterspouts, dashed to mist upon rocks, beaten by millions of tails, and breathed by millions of gills, whence at last, melted into vapour by the sun, it is lifted up pure into the air, and borne by the servant winds back to the mountain tops and the snow, the solid ice, and the molten stream.

The family were wild," she said suddenly. "They tried to marry me off. And then when I'd begun to feel that after all life was scarcely worth living I found something"—her eyes went skyward exultantly—"I found something!" Carlyle waited and her words came with a rush. “Courage—just that; courage as a rule of life, and something to cling to always. I began to build up this enormous faith in myself. I began to see that in all my idols in the past some manifestation of courage had unconsciously been the thing that attracted me. I began separating courage from the other things of life. All sorts of courage—the beaten, bloody prize-fighter coming up for more—I used to make men take me to prize-fights; the déclassé woman sailing through a nest of cats and looking at them as if they were mud under her feet; the liking what you like always; the utter disregard for other people's opinions—just to live as I liked always and to die in my own way—Did you bring up the cigarettes?" He handed one over and held a match for her silently. "Still," Ardita continued, "the men kept gathering—old men and young men, my mental and physical inferiors, most of them, but all intensely desiring to have me—to own this rather magnificent proud tradition I'd built up round me. Do you see?" "Sort of. You never were beaten and you never apologized." "Never!" She sprang to the edge, poised or a moment like a crucified figure against the sky; then describing a dark parabola plunked without a slash between two silver ripples twenty feet below. Her voice floated up to him again. "And courage to me meant ploughing through that dull gray mist that comes down on life—not only over-riding people and circumstances but over-riding the bleakness of living. A sort of insistence on the value of life and the worth of transient things." She was climbing up now, and at her last words her head, with the damp yellow hair slicked symmetrically back, appeared on his level. "All very well," objected Carlyle. "You can call it courage, but your courage is really built, after all, on a pride of birth. You were bred to that defiant attitude. On my gray days even courage is one of the things that's gray and lifeless." She was sitting near the edge, hugging her knees and gazing abstractedly at the white moon; he was farther back, crammed like a grotesque god into a niche in the rock. "I don't want to sound like Pollyanna," she began, "but you haven't grasped me yet. My courage is faith—faith in the eternal resilience of me—that joy'll come back, and hope and spontaneity. And I feel that till it does I've got to keep my lips shut and my chin high, and my eyes wide—not necessarily any silly smiling. Oh, I've been through hell without a whine quite often—and the female hell is deadlier than the male." "But supposing," suggested Carlyle, "that before joy and hope and all that came back the curtain was drawn on you for good?" Ardita rose, and going to the wall climbed with some difficulty to the next ledge, another ten or fifteen feet above. "Why," she called back, "then I'd have won!

In the deep woods of the far North, under feathery leaves of fern, was a great fairyland of merry elves, sometimes called forest brownies. These elves lived joyfully. They had everything at hand and did not need to worry much about living. Berries and nuts grew plentiful in the forest. Rivers and springs provided the elves with crystal water. Flowers prepared them drink from their flavorful juices, which the munchkins loved greatly. At midnight the elves climbed into flower cups and drank drops of their sweet water with much delight. Every elf would tell a wonderful fairy tale to the flower to thank it for the treat. Despite this abundance, the pixies did not sit back and do nothing. They tinkered with their tasks all day long. They cleaned their houses. They swung on tree branches and swam in forested streams. Together with the early birds, they welcomed the sunrise, listened to the thunder growling, the whispering of leaves and blades of grass, and the conversations of the animals. The birds told them about warm countries, sunbeams whispered of distant seas, and the moon spoke of treasures hidden deeply in the earth. In winter, the elves lived in abandoned nests and hollows. Every sunny day they came out of their burrows and made the forest ring with their happy shouts, throwing tiny snowballs in all directions and building snowmen as small as the pinky finger of a little girl. The munchkins thought they were giants five times as large as them. With the first breath of spring, the elves left their winter residences and moved to the cups of the snowdrop flowers. Looking around, they watched the snow as it turned black and melted. They kept an eye on the blossoming of hazel trees while the leaves were still sleeping in their warm buds. They observed squirrels moving their last winter supplies from storage back to their homes. Gnomes welcomed the birds coming back to their old nests, where the elves lived during winters. Little by little, the forest once more grew green. One moonlight night, elves were sitting at an old willow tree and listening to mermaids singing about their underwater kingdom. “Brothers! Where is Murzilka? He has not been around for a long time!” said one of the elves, Father Beardie, who had a long white beard. He was older than others and well respected in his striped stocking cap. “I’m here,” a snotty voice arose, and Murzilka himself, nicknamed Feather Head, jumped from the top of the tree. All the brothers loved Murzilka, but thought he was lazy, as he actually was. Also, he loved to dress in a tailcoat, tall black hat, boots with narrow toes, a cane and a single eyeglass, being very proud of that look. “Do you know where I’m coming from? The very Arctic Ocean!” roared he. Usually, his words were hard to believe. That time, though, his announcement sounded so marvelous that all elves around him were agape with wonder. “You were there, really? Were you? How did you get there?” asked the sprites. “As easy as ABC! I came by the fox one day and caught her packing her things to visit her cousin, a silver fox who lives by the Arctic Ocean. “Take me with you,” I said to the fox. “Oh, no, you’ll freeze there! You know, it’s cold there!” she said. “Come on.” I said. “What are you talking about? What cold? Summer is here.” “Here we have summer, but there they have winter,” she answered. “No,” I thought. “She must be lying because she does not want to give me a ride.” Without telling her a word, I jumped upon her back and hid in her bushy fur, so even Father Frost could not find me. Like it or not, she had to take me with her. We ran for a long time. Another forest followed our woods, and then a boundless plain opened, a swamp covered with lichen and moss. Despite the intense heat, it had not entirely thawed. “This is tundra,” said my fellow traveler. “Tundra? What is tundra?” asked I. “Tundra is a huge, forever frozen wetland covering the entire coast of the Arctic Ocean.

I have had so many Dwellings, Nat, that I know these Streets as well as a strowling Beggar: I was born in this Nest of Death and Contagion and now, as they say, I have learned to feather it. When first I was with Sir Chris. I found lodgings in Phenix Street off Hogg Lane, close by St Giles and Tottenham Fields, and then in later times I was lodged at the corner of Queen Street and Thames Street, next to the Blew Posts in Cheapside. (It is still there, said Nat stirring up from his Seat, I have passed it!) In the time before the Fire, Nat, most of the buildings in London were made of timber and plaister, and stones were so cheap that a man might have a cart-load of them for six-pence or seven-pence; but now, like the Aegyptians, we are all for Stone. (And Nat broke in, I am for Stone!) The common sort of People gawp at the prodigious Rate of Building and exclaim to each other London is now another City or that House was not there Yesterday or the Situacion of the Streets is quite Changd (I contemn them when they say such things! Nat adds). But this Capital City of the World of Affliction is still the Capitol of Darknesse, or the Dungeon of Man's Desires: still in the Centre are no proper Streets nor Houses but a Wilderness of dirty rotten Sheds, allways tumbling or takeing Fire, with winding crooked passages, lakes of Mire and rills of stinking Mud, as befits the smokey grove of Moloch. (I have heard of that Gentleman, says Nat all a quiver). It is true that in what we call the Out-parts there are numberless ranges of new Buildings: in my old Black-Eagle Street, Nat, tenements have been rais'd and where my Mother and Father stared without understanding at their Destroyer (Death! he cryed) new-built Chambers swarm with life. But what a Chaos and Confusion is there: meer fields of Grass give way to crooked Passages and quiet Lanes to smoking Factors, and these new Houses, commonly built by the London workmen, are often burning and frequently tumbling down (I saw one, says he, I saw one tumbling!). Thus London grows more Monstrous, Straggling and out of all Shape: in this Hive of Noise and Ignorance, Nat, we are tyed to the World as to a sensible Carcasse and as we cross the stinking Body we call out What News? or What's a clock? And thus do I pass my Days a stranger to mankind. I'll not be a Stander-by, but you will not see me pass among them in the World. (You will disquiet your self, Master, says Nat coming towards me). And what a World is it, of Tricking and Bartering, Buying and Selling, Borrowing and Lending, Paying and Receiving; when I walk among the Piss and Sir-reverence of the Streets I hear, Money makes the old Wife trot, Money makes the Mare to go (and Nat adds, What Words won't do, Gold will). What is their God but shineing Dirt and to sing its Devotions come the Westminster-Hall-whores, the Charing-cross whores, the Whitehall whores, the Channel-row whores, the Strand whores, the Fleet Street whores, the Temple-bar whores; and they are followed in the same Catch by the Riband weavers, the Silver-lace makers, the Upholsterers, the Cabinet-makers, Watermen, Carmen, Porters, Plaisterers, Lightemen, Footmen, Shopkeepers, Journey-men... and my Voice grew faint through the Curtain of my Pain.

My dwelling was small, and I could hardly entertain an echo in it; but it seemed larger for being a single apartment and remote from neighbors. All the attractions of a house were concentrated in one room; it was kitchen, chamber, parlor, and keeping-room; and whatever satisfaction parent or child, master or servant, derive from living in a house, I enjoyed it all. Cato says, the master of a family (patremfamilias) must have in his rustic villa "cellam oleariam, vinariam, dolia multa, uti lubeat caritatem expectare, et rei, et virtuti, et gloriae erit," that is, "an oil and wine cellar, many casks, so that it may be pleasant to expect hard times; it will be for his advantage, and virtue, and glory." I had in my cellar a firkin of potatoes, about two quarts of peas with the weevil in them, and on my shelf a little rice, a jug of molasses, and of rye and Indian meal a peck each. I sometimes dream of a larger and more populous house, standing in a golden age, of enduring materials, and without gingerbread work, which shall still consist of only one room, a vast, rude, substantial, primitive hall, without ceiling or plastering, with bare rafters and purlins supporting a sort of lower heaven over one's head—useful to keep off rain and snow, where the king and queen posts stand out to receive your homage, when you have done reverence to the prostrate Saturn of an older dynasty on stepping over the sill; a cavernous house, wherein you must reach up a torch upon a pole to see the roof; where some may live in the fireplace, some in the recess of a window, and some on settles, some at one end of the hall, some at another, and some aloft on rafters with the spiders, if they choose; a house which you have got into when you have opened the outside door, and the ceremony is over; where the weary traveller may wash, and eat, and converse, and sleep, without further journey; such a shelter as you would be glad to reach in a tempestuous night, containing all the essentials of a house, and nothing for house-keeping; where you can see all the treasures of the house at one view, and everything hangs upon its peg, that a man should use; at once kitchen, pantry, parlor, chamber, storehouse, and garret; where you can see so necessary a thing, as a barrel or a ladder, so convenient a thing as a cupboard, and hear the pot boil, and pay your respects to the fire that cooks your dinner, and the oven that bakes your bread, and the necessary furniture and utensils are the chief ornaments; where the washing is not put out, nor the fire, nor the mistress, and perhaps you are sometimes requested to move from off the trap-door, when the cook would descend into the cellar, and so learn whether the ground is solid or hollow beneath you without stamping. A house whose inside is as open and manifest as a bird's nest, and you cannot go in at the front door and out at the back without seeing some of its inhabitants; where to be a guest is to be presented with the freedom of the house, and not to be carefully excluded from seven eighths of it, shut up in a particular cell, and told to make yourself at home there—in solitary confinement. Nowadays the host does not admit you to his hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourself somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art of keeping you at the greatest distance. There is as much secrecy about the cooking as if he had a design to poison you. I am aware that I have been on many a man's premises, and might have been legally ordered off, but I am not aware that I have been in many men's houses. I might visit in my old clothes a king and queen who lived simply in such a house as I have described, if I were going their way; but backing out of a modern palace will be all that I shall desire to learn, if ever I am caught in one.

Unchopping a Tree. Start with the leaves, the small twigs, and the nests that have been shaken, ripped, or broken off by the fall; these must be gathered and attached once again to their respective places. It is not arduous work, unless major limbs have been smashed or mutilated. If the fall was carefully and correctly planned, the chances of anything of the kind happening will have been reduced. Again, much depends upon the size, age, shape, and species of the tree. Still, you will be lucky if you can get through this stages without having to use machinery. Even in the best of circumstances it is a labor that will make you wish often that you had won the favor of the universe of ants, the empire of mice, or at least a local tribe of squirrels, and could enlist their labors and their talents. But no, they leave you to it. They have learned, with time. This is men's work. It goes without saying that if the tree was hollow in whole or in part, and contained old nests of bird or mammal or insect, or hoards of nuts or such structures as wasps or bees build for their survival, the contents will have to repaired where necessary, and reassembled, insofar as possible, in their original order, including the shells of nuts already opened. With spider's webs you must simply do the best you can. We do not have the spider's weaving equipment, nor any substitute for the leaf's living bond with its point of attachment and nourishment. It is even harder to simulate the latter when the leaves have once become dry — as they are bound to do, for this is not the labor of a moment. Also it hardly needs saying that this the time fro repairing any neighboring trees or bushes or other growth that might have been damaged by the fall. The same rules apply. Where neighboring trees were of the same species it is difficult not to waste time conveying a detached leaf back to the wrong tree. Practice, practice. Put your hope in that. Now the tackle must be put into place, or the scaffolding, depending on the surroundings and the dimension of the tree. It is ticklish work. Almost always it involves, in itself, further damage to the area, which will have to be corrected later. But, as you've heard, it can't be helped. And care now is likely to save you considerable trouble later. Be careful to grind nothing into the ground. At last the time comes for the erecting of the trunk. By now it will scarcely be necessary to remind you of the delicacy of this huge skeleton. Every motion of the tackle, every slightly upward heave of the trunk, the branches, their elaborately reassembled panoply of leaves (now dead) will draw from you an involuntary gasp. You will watch for a lead or a twig to be snapped off yet again. You will listen for the nuts to shift in the hollow limb and you will hear whether they are indeed falling into place or are spilling in disorder — in which case, or in the event of anything else of the kind — operations will have to cease, of course, while you correct the matter. The raising itself is no small enterprise, from the moment when the chains tighten around the old bandages until the boles hands vertical above the stump, splinter above splinter. How the final straightening of the splinters themselves can take place (the preliminary work is best done while the wood is still green and soft, but at times when the splinters are not badly twisted most of the straightening is left until now, when the torn ends are face to face with each other). When the splinters are perfectly complementary the appropriate fixative is applied. Again we have no duplicate of the original substance. Ours is extremely strong, but it is rigid. It is limited to surfaces, and there is no play in it. However the core is not the part of the trunk that conducted life from the roots up to the branches and back again. It was relatively inert. The fixative for this part is not the same as the one for the outer layers and the bark, and if either of these is involved