He lists the materials: boards $8.03, refuse shingles $4, laths $1.25, two second-hand windows $2.43, a thousand old bricks $4, two casks of lime $2.40, nails $3.90 and transportation $1.40, plus small items like hinges, latch and chalk. That excludes his own labor and the timber, stones and sand he claimed by squatter's right.

He describes a tight shingled and plastered house ten feet wide by fifteen long, with eight-foot posts, a garret and a closet, a large window on each side, two trap-doors, one door at the end and a brick fireplace opposite. He shingled the sides and built the chimney before winter.

He says the cost of a thing is the amount of life exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run. An average local house costs perhaps eight hundred dollars, which takes a laborer ten to fifteen years to save at one dollar a day, so he spends over half his life earning his wigwam.

They toil twenty, thirty or forty years to own farms inherited with encumbrances or bought with hired money. The assessors cannot name a dozen who own their farms free and clear, and he doubts there are three such men in Concord. The farmer solves a livelihood by a formula more complicated than the problem.

Near the end of March 1845 he borrowed an axe and went to the woods by Walden Pond to cut tall white pines for timber. He hewed the main timbers six inches square, mortised each stick, and by the middle of April the house was framed and ready for raising. He returned the axe sharper than he received it.

He bought the shanty of James Collins, an Irishman who worked on the Fitchburg Railroad, for four dollars and twenty-five cents. Collins was to vacate at five the next morning and Thoreau took possession at six. He took the shanty down, drew the nails and carried the boards to the pond-side in small cartloads to bleach in the sun.

He dug it in the side of a hill sloping south, where a woodchuck had once burrowed, six feet square by seven deep, down to fine sand where potatoes would not freeze. The sides were left unstoned and still hold. It took two hours' work, and he notes that under the most splendid city house there is still a cellar.

In the beginning of May, with help from acquaintances, he set up the frame, more for neighborliness than necessity. He began to occupy the house on the 4th of July, as soon as it was boarded and roofed with feather-edged, lapped boards that kept out rain, cooking outdoors until he built the chimney in the fall.

Quoting the secretary of New Netherland writing in 1650, he describes settlers digging a square pit six or seven feet deep, casing it with wood lined with bark, flooring it with plank and roofing it with spars covered in bark or sods. Families lived dry and warm in these for two, three or four years before building proper houses.

He argues students should not play life or study it merely but earnestly live it. He contrasts a boy who made his own jack-knife from ore he dug and smelted with one who attended metallurgy lectures and got a Rogers penknife, and says he learned on leaving college that he had studied navigation without going down the harbour.