Then I had a taste of real hunting.

Reverdy and I had gone to marshes a few miles away for wild geese and ducks; and we had come back loaded with game for ourselves and friends.

There were many parties and what were called "shucking bees," where the company set to to assist the host in ridding the corn of its sheath; and quilting bees; and apple parings.
These were occasions of festival, the local rituals of Dionysius.
Earlier in the fall I had gone to a county fair and had seen the products of the field on display; and had studied the people: the tall angular gawks, the men carrying whips, the dust, the noise, the cheap fakirs and gamblers, the fights, the drunkenness, the women tired and perspiring carrying their babies and leading a brood.

To me it was more like a cattle pen befogged with dust than an assemblage of human beings.
And there was no happiness, no real joy; only barbaric breaking away from hard labor and the silence of the farms; only a reeling and a howling and a war dance; and only here and there a flash of breeding and fineness, and intelligent use of the occasion for sweeter joys and fuller life.
The winter came down; but I was better prepared for it than I was the year before.

My house with its walls a foot thick of solid oak and tightly plastered against the penetrating winds kept out the cold.