There is little or nothing to be remembered written on the subject of getting an honest living. Neither the New Testament nor Poor Richard speaks to our condition. I cannot think of a single page which entertains, much less answers, the questions which I put to myself on this subject. How to make the getting our living poetic! for if it is not poetic, it is not life but death that we get. Is it that men are too disgusted with their experience to speak of it? or that commonly they do not question the common modes? The most practically important of all questions, it seems to me, is how shall I get my living, and yet I find little or nothing said to the purpose in any book. Those who are living on the interest of money inherited, or dishonestly, _i. e._ by false methods, acquired, are of course incompetent to answer it. I consider that society with all its arts, has done nothing for us in this respect. One would think, from looking at literature, that this question had never disturbed a solitary individual’s musings. Cold and hunger seem more friendly to my nature than those methods which men have adopted and advise to ward them off.[145] If it were not that I desire to do something here,—accomplish some work,—I should certainly prefer to suffer and die rather than be at the pains to get a living by the modes men propose. There may be an excess even of informing light. Niepce, a Frenchman, announced that “no substance can be exposed to the sun’s rays without undergoing a chemical change.” Granite rocks and stone structures and statues of metal, etc., “are,” says Robert Hunt, “all alike destructively acted upon during the hours of sunshine, and, but for provisions of nature no less wonderful, would soon perish under the delicate touch of the most subtile of the agencies of the universe.” But Niepce showed, says Hunt, “that those bodies which underwent this change during daylight possessed the power of restoring themselves to their original conditions during the hours of night, when this excitement was no longer influencing them.” So, in the case of the daguerreotype, “the picture which we receive to-night, unless we adopt some method of securing its permanency, fades away before the morning, and we try to restore it in vain.” (Infers) “the hours of darkness are as necessary to the inorganic creation as we know night and sleep are to the organic kingdom.” Such is the influence of “actinism,” that power in the sun’s rays which produces a chemical effect.[146] _Feb. 25._ A very windy day. A slight snow which fell last night was melted at noon. A strong, gusty wind; the waves on the meadows make a fine show. I saw at Hubbard’s Bridge that all the ice had been blown up-stream from the meadows, and was collected over the channel against the bridge in large cakes. These were covered and intermingled with a remarkable quantity of the meadow’s crust. There was no ice to be seen up-stream and no more downstream.