那么，对于我们的身体来说，最大的必需便是保持温暖，维持体内那维生之热量。我们为此真是煞费苦心——不光需要准备食物、衣物和庇护所，还要有床榻——那是我们夜里穿的衣服，是我们洗劫鸟儿们的巢，夺去它们胸前羽毛，才打造而成的又一层庇护，好似那鼹鼠用草叶作床摆在洞穴尽头！穷苦的人常抱怨这世间的冰冷，与其说是肉体上的感触，不如说是世态炎凉，令我们直指切身的几多苦痛。在一些地区，夏日的气候可以提供近乎极乐的生活条件。除了烹饪所需，燃料变得不再重要；太阳便是火源，一众果实在其照射下充分成熟；食物通常也更加多样，更加易得，而衣物和庇护所则完全或基本不再被需要。现如今在这个国家，据我自己的经验，所需的不过一些工具、一把刀、一把斧子、一把铲子、一辆独轮车，云云；对于那些勤奋的人，外加台灯、文具，再准备几本书即可，所有这些花上一点小钱就能置办齐全。然而有些头脑发昏者偏要跑去地球另一端，去到那荒蛮生瘴之地，钻营生意十几二十年，就为了谋个生计——换句话说不过是维持自身的温暖舒适——最后死在新英格兰。过分奢靡的富有已经超出了维持自身温暖舒适的范畴，而是维持了一种变态的热；正如我先前所言，他们是在自我烹煮，不过当然了，是以一种“时髦”的方式。
The grand necessity, then, for our bodies, is to keep warm, to keep the vital heat in us. What pains we accordingly take, not only with our Food, and Clothing, and Shelter, but with our beds, which are our night-clothes, robbing the nests and breasts of birds to prepare this shelter within a shelter, as the mole has its bed of grass and leaves at the end of its burrow! The poor man is wont to complain that this is a cold world; and to cold, no less physical than social, we refer directly a great part of our ails. The summer, in some climates, makes possible to man a sort of Elysian life. Fuel, except to cook his Food, is then unnecessary; the sun is his fire, and many of the fruits are sufficiently cooked by its rays; while Food generally is more various, and more easily obtained, and Clothing and Shelter are wholly or half unnecessary. At the present day, and in this country, as I find by my own experience, a few implements, a knife, an axe, a spade, a wheelbarrow, &c., and for the studious, lamplight, stationery, and access to a few books, rank next to necessaries, and can all be obtained at a trifling cost. Yet some, not wise, go to the other side of the globe, to barbarous and unhealthy regions, and devote themselves to trade for ten or twenty years, in order that they may live,—that is, keep comfortably warm,—and die in New England at last. The luxuriously rich are not simply kept comfortably warm, but unnaturally hot; as I implied before, they are cooked, of course à la mode.
