Page:Thoreau - As remembered by a young friend.djvu/64

 mere lath and plastering: such a deed would keep me awake nights. Give me a hammer and let me feel for the furring. Drive a nail home, and clinch it so faithfully, that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction, a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse. So will help you God, and so only. Every nail driven should be as another rivet in the machine of the universe, you carrying on the work." Small things for him symbolized great.

Thoreau enjoyed his surveying, and the more if it led him into the wild lands East of the Sun, West of the Moon. But he construed his business largely, looking deeper than its surface. While searching for their bounds with his townsmen and neighbours in village, swamp, and woodlot, he found everywhere, marked far more distinctly than by blazed black-oak