see tall Asaph Langdon, then foreman of the carpenters,
sauntering up the valley with a roll of paper, or an
adze, or a shingle with some calculations on it,--with
something on which he wanted Mr. Orcutt's directions for
the day.

An hour of nothings set the carnal machinery of the
day agoing. We fed the horses, the cows, the pigs, and
the hens. We collected the eggs and cleaned the hen-
houses and the barns. We brought in wood enough for the
day's fire, and water enough for the day's cooking and
cleanliness. These heads describe what I and the
children did. Polly's life during that hour was more
mysterious. That great first hour of the day is devoted
with women to the deepest arcana of the Eleusinian
mysteries of the divine science of housekeeping. She who
can meet the requisitions of that hour wisely and bravely
conquers in the Day's Battle. But what she does in it,
let no man try to say! It can be named, but not
described, in the comprehensive formula, "Just stepping
round."

That hour well given to chores and to digestion, the
children went to Mr. Orcutt's open-air school, and I to
my rustic study,--a separate cabin, with a rough square
table in it, and some book-boxes equally rude. No man
entered it, excepting George and me. Here for two hours
I worked undisturbed,--how happy the world, had it
neither postman nor door-bell!--worked upon my Traces of
Sandemanianism in the Sixth and Seventh Centuries, and