Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/47

Rh could be disgraced so), and doing the indispensable work, however humble. How much better and more humane it was than if they had imported and set up among their penates a headless torso from the ruins of Ireland! I am glad to find that our New England life has a genuine, humane core to it; that inside, after all, there is so little pretense and brag. The middle-aged son sits there in the old unpainted house in a ragged coat, and helps his old mother about her work when the field does not require him.

Dec. 26, 1859. Skate to Lee's Bridge. I see a brute with a gun in his hand standing motionless over a muskrat's house which he has destroyed. I find that he has visited every one in the neighborhood of Fair Haven Pond, above and below, and broken them all down, laying open the interior to the water, and then stood watchful close by for the poor creature to show its head for a breath of air. There lies the red carcass of one whose pelt he has taken on the spot, and for his afternoon's cruelty that fellow will be rewarded with ninepence, perchance. When I consider the opportunities of the civilized man for getting ninepences and getting light, this seems to me more savage than savages are. Depend on it that whoever thus treats the muskrat's house, his refuge when the water is frozen thick, he and his family will not come to