tempts him at every point to delegate his own proper toil to others.  I can conceive of few things that would do more to create a genuine pride of home than to insist that no man should possess a house except by building it for himself, after the old primitive principle of the earliest social communities.  To build thus is to mix sentiment with the mortar, and the house thus created is a place to which affections and memories cling; whereas the mere tenancy of a cube of rotten bricks, thrown together by the jerry-builder—­of which we know no more than the amount of rent which is charged for it—­is incapable of nourishing any sentiment, and is, in any case, not a home but a lodging.

This idea is no doubt chimerical; for in a vast city, where the great object is to escape starvation, no one has time to interest himself deeply in the kind of house he occupies, and still less has he the opportunity to build a house which is the expression of his own taste and labour.  But in the country the idea is not only practicable, it is urgent.  Independence is made necessary because there are fewer people on whom we can become dependent.  I soon found that if I wanted potatoes and cabbages, I must grow them; if a pipe burst there was no plumber to mend it, I must mend it myself; and so through a long range of occupations, with which I had had no previous acquaintance.  The immortal Captain Davis, of the Sea Ranger, remarks to the incompetent landsman Herrick, whom he has engaged as first mate on the Farralone, ’There ain’t nothing to sailoring when you come to look it in the face,’ and I am inclined to think that the observation is true of other things besides navigation.  There is nothing in ordinary gardening, carpentering, or work about a house that any intelligent man cannot learn in a month by giving his mind to it.  Intelligence, industry, and a deft hand will take any man of capacity through any of the ordinary employments of life with moderate credit, or at least without disgrace.  When once the right handling of tools is learned, the rest is merely a matter of intelligence.  At all events, I had to learn how to be proficient in the handling of many strange tools, because there was no one within reach to handle them for me.  The experience was salutary for me in every way.  It taught me to be ashamed of that kind of inefficiency which in towns is reckoned the hall-mark of gentility.  It taught me the virtue of that independence which makes a man equal to his own needs.  It also saved me from ennui.  I found myself living a much busier life than I had ever lived.  I had never worked so hard, and yet there was not a single part of my work that did not add to my delight.  And I worked for direct results, for things I could see, and things which I might justly claim as my own, since I had created them.