great hall. Houses, often of gentry, were built of a heavy timber frame,
filled up with lath and plaster. People slept on rough mats or straw
pallets, with a round log for a pillow; seldom better beds than a
mattress, with a sack of chaff for a pillow.


October 25th.--A walk yesterday through Dark Lane, and home through the
village of Danvers. Landscape now wholly autumnal. Saw an elderly man
laden with two dry, yellow, rustling bundles of Indian corn-stalks,--a
good personification of Autumn. Another man hoeing up potatoes. Rows of
white cabbages lay ripening. Fields of dry Indian corn. The grass has
still considerable greenness. Wild rose-bushes devoid of leaves, with
their deep, bright red seed-vessels. Meeting-house in Danvers seen at a
distance, with the sun shining through the windows of its belfry.
Barberry-bushes,--the leaves now of a brown red, still juicy and healthy;
very few berries remaining, mostly frost-bitten and wilted. All among
the yet green grass, dry stalks of weeds. The down of thistles
occasionally seen flying through the sunny air.

In this dismal chamber FAME was won. (Salem, Union Street.)

Those who are very difficult in choosing wives seem as if they would take
none of Nature's ready-made works, but want a woman manufactured
particularly to their order.

A council of the passengers in a street: called by somebody to decide
upon some points important to him.

Every individual has a place to fill in the world, and is important in
some respects, whether he chooses to be so or not.