Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/435

Rh of the cone with a few strokes of his chisels, and it is his. To be sure, he may let it fall to the ground, and look down at it for a moment curiously, as if it were not his. But he is taking note where it lies, that he may add it to his heap of a hundred more like it, and it is only so much the more his for his seeming carelessness. And when he comes to open it, observe how he proceeds. He holds it in his hands a solid embossed cone, so hard it almost rings at the touch of his teeth. He pauses for a moment, perhaps, but it is not because he does not know how to begin. He only listens to hear what is in the wind. He knows better than to cut off the top, and work his way downward against a cheval-de-frise of advanced scales and prickles, or to gnaw into the side for three quarters of an inch in the face of many armed shields. He whirls it bottom upward in a twinkling, where the scales are smallest and the prickles slight or none, and the short stem is cut so close as not to be in his way, and there he proceeds to cut through the thin and tender bases of the scales, and each stroke tells, laying bare at once a couple of seeds. Thus he strips it as easily as if its scales were chaff, and so rapidly, twirling it as he advances, that you cannot tell how he does it till you drive him off, and inspect his unfinished work. If there ever was an age of the world when the