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- sixth story on top of his previous four. And, not till the gentleman
has achieved his aspiration, not till he has stolen over the way by
twilight and observed how his sixth story soars beyond his neighbor's
fifth--not till then does he retire to his rest with satisfaction.
Such folks, it seems to me, need mountains for neighbors, to take this
emulous conceit of soaring out of them.
If, considering that mine is a very wide house, and by no means lofty,
aught in the above may appear like interested pleading, as if I did but
fold myself about in the cloak of a general proposition, cunningly to
tickle my individual vanity beneath it, such misconception must vanish
upon my frankly conceding, that land adjoining my alder swamp was
sold last month for ten dollars an acre, and thought a rash purchase
at that; so that for wide houses hereabouts there is plenty of room,
and cheap. Indeed so cheap--dirt cheap--is the soil, that our elms
thrust out their roots in it, and hang their great boughs over it,
in the most lavish and reckless way. Almost all our crops, too, are
sown broadcast, even peas and turnips. A farmer among us, who should
go about his twenty-acre field, poking his finger into it here and
there, and dropping down a mustard seed, would be thought a penurious,
narrow-minded husbandman. The dandelions in the river-meadows, and the
forget-me-nots along the mountain roads, you see at once they are put
to no economy in space. Some seasons, too, our rye comes up here and
there a spear, sole and single like a church-spire. It doesn't care to
crowd itself where it knows there is such a deal of room. The world
is wide, the world is all before us, says the rye. Weeds, too, it is
amazing how they spread. No such thing as arresting them--some of our
pastures being a sort of Alsatia for the weeds. As for the grass,
every spring it is like Kossuth's rising of what he calls the peoples.
Mountains, too, a regular camp-meeting of them. For the same reason,
the same all-sufficiency of room, our shadows march and countermarch,
going through their various drills and masterly evolutions, like the
old imperial guard on the Champs de Mars. As for the hills, especially
where the roads cross them the supervisors of our various towns have
given notice to all concerned, that they can come and dig them down
and cart them off, and never a cent to pay, no more than for the
privilege of picking blackberries. The stranger who is buried here,
what liberal-hearted landed proprietor among us grudges him six feet of
rocky pasture?
Nevertheless, cheap, after all, as our land is, and much as it is
trodden under foot, I, for one, am proud of it for what it bears; and
chiefly for its three great lions--the Great Oak, Ogg Mountain, and my
chimney.
Most houses, here, are but one and a half stories high; few exceed two.
That in which I and my chimney dwell, is in width nearly twice its
height, from sill to eaves--which accounts for the magnitude of its
main content--besides showing that in this house, as in this country at
large, there is abundance of space, and to spare, for both of us.
The frame of the old house is of wood--which but the more sets forth
the solidity of the chimney, which is of brick. And as the great
wrought nails, binding the clapboards, are unknown in these degenerate
days, so are the huge bricks in the chimney walls. The architect of the
chimney must have had the pyramid of Cheops before him; for, after that
famous structure, it seems modeled, only its rate of decrease towards
the summit is considerably less, and it is truncated. From the exact
middle of the mansion it soars from the cellar, right up through each
successive floor, till, four feet square, it breaks water from the
ridge-pole of the roof, like an anvil-headed whale, through the crest
of a billow. Most people, though, liken it, in that part, to a razed
observatory, masoned up.
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- Chunk 24