IV

The dear presences are ranged about you there, in the centre of that

universe for which you have longed; it is good there, and what does

the rest matter? For a lover who has been nourished exclusively on his

dreams for six months, the joy of return surpasses everything. It is

winter; but what warms Henry is not merely the sticks in the stove. All

Concord offers its warmth for his return.

He finds his father still busy with the pencils. What if he were to

turn in and help? All right, the pencils. The lead seems less grey

in the delight of his return. Since he has nothing to look for in a

literary way, and no opportunity offers for the moment, he will stay

at home and attend to the pencil business with his father. Doesn’t it

occur to you that a miserable little piece of lead imprisoned between

two sticks of cedar-wood may be unworthy of your attention? It is not

quite what you have dreamed of, perhaps. But Henry knows the secret.

For there is a secret. So much so that it would be a mistake for anyone

who has no business there to approach the workshop where the Thoreaus,

father and son, manufacture their product.

The business had made progress since the time when the unlucky

store-keeper had bethought himself of competing with Monroe, the

Concord pencilmaker. It was quite a story. The native pencils were

not good for much, even Monroe’s, in spite of the process he had

invented; they had the disagreeable grain of poor, scratchy, brittle,

inefficient pencils. No chance of holding out in the market beside the

imported English pencils, and especially the incomparable Fabers from

Germany. So something better had to be tried if they were to satisfy

people who liked good pencils. To obtain a good pencil, everything

depended on the treatment and the preparation of the graphite, which

came from Sturbridge, then from Canada, and which the elder Thoreau

had especially ground for him at Acton. The first thing was to reduce

the graphite to a very fine powder, which was obtained by means of an

ingenious, primitive machine that enabled them to collect exclusively

the finest dust from the material ground in the mill. This was a great

point gained. After this the softness of the pencil depended on the

product mixed with the pulverized graphite, upon so composing the paste

that, once hardened, it would produce that delicate, firm substance

that glides on the paper between your fingers, leaving a fine, vigorous

mark, of a beautiful grey-black, and not that dim, vague mark that bad

pencils have. Hitherto the elder Thoreau had produced this effect,

like his predecessor Monroe, by the use of spermaceti or bayberry

wax mixed with glue, while there entered into the composition of the

Faber pencils a certain clay that was found in Bavaria. They succeeded

in procuring this. The result was remarkable. After much groping and

difficulty they at length arrived at the goal of their efforts, the

perfect pencil. It was awarded a first medal at the exposition of

mechanical arts in Salem. Henceforth they could hold their own in

competition with the English pencils of pure graphite or even the

Fabers with their skilful proportioning of graphite and Bavarian clay.

But they could not think of turning out a pencil as cheap as these. The

Thoreau pencils cost twenty-five cents, in spite of which many teachers

of drawing who saw how excellent they were recommended them to their

pupils. A friend, Horace Hosmer, was the traveller for the house. So

the business was not bad. But they also had to watch carefully lest

someone else should steal the process. This explained the mystery that

surrounded the great work--the mystery of the mill at Acton where

they ground the graphite, the mystery of the very primitive workshop,

adjoining the house, where, with a workman who could be trusted not to

give them away, they manufactured, finished, packed and shipped the

choice article. Six dollars a gross, and the daily bread of the family

depended on it.

In these researches, these experiments, this final success,

Henry played an ample part. It was he who had found out in some

reference-book about this clay which the masters of the pencil industry

used in Germany, and who had contrived two or three pieces of apparatus

of capital importance, notably for the cutting out of the slabs of

hardened paste and the drilling of the blocks of wood that were

destined to receive the lead. So long as it was a question of producing

a fine pencil that would be satisfying to exacting draughtsmen, you

could count on his skill and his zeal; to conquer a difficulty was the

business of the admirable Henry, master of ingenious arts. But when the

end was attained the pencil-factory left him rather lukewarm; it was

a simple affair of exploiting an invention and reaping profits. All

very well for his family who lived by it. But if the equilibrium of the

family rested on the lead-pencils, his equilibrium had a less friable

foundation. He would help his father, yes, as much as was necessary.

But sell his entire life in pencils, no, thank you; he had other fish

to fry. With his life he wrote poems--even without a pencil.

Working in the paternal factory was then, after all, only a makeshift.

Always the same story: the pencils were his father’s business. Even

though it was enough to keep them all afloat, Henry was unwilling to

be a charge on his family. He must earn a little outside and butter

with a little independence the bread that he ate at home. But how?

School-teaching, tutoring, already had a rather stale taste. A page

turned--look further.

This thing that is rolling in his head, turning over and over, this

trifle of one’s daily bread, is a great problem when you don’t follow

the beaten track that leads to ease and self-disgust. He is not

stupider or clumsier than other people; he is qualified in all sorts of

lines and has plenty of good will. Who is going to profit by employing

him in some way in which he knows he can do a good job? Mystery. Unless

you are looking for a flogging schoolmaster for your children, or a

scribbler of copy, or a clerk, or a servant by the year, or an animal

that will place himself in the shafts, here I am with hands at the

ends of my long arms, five strong fingers on each hand, a trade at

the end of each of my ten fingers, and a head full of resources. I am

twenty-seven years old and have not travelled very much, but I know

enough about the world and myself not to sell you my beautiful liberty,

except in bits. Ask me for a day, two days, three days of work; from

childhood I have been used to manual labour, I have always been a good

gardener, in a house I have taken the place of several workmen, I can

build a boat, and in the woods I am as much at home as a wood-cutter.

Give me the tools and you will see. My hands and my brain and my good

will are for anyone who wants to take them for a dollar a day.

And you will get something for your dollar, I promise you. _Noblesse

oblige._ When one has the honour to be called Henry Thoreau, one

doesn’t do one’s work by halves. One respects one’s work, whether it is

for someone else or for oneself, because one respects oneself. At your

service.

After various experiments, Henry, graduate of Harvard, son and grandson

and great-grandson of merchants, has already made his choice. The lot

he desires most, as the happiest and the freest, and the worthiest as

well, is that of a day-labourer, who cuts off a slice of his time to

sell, when he must, but takes good pains not to sell the whole loaf.

He knows that fifty days of work a year will be enough to pay for his

keep, such as it is. And all the other days, six each week, will be for

God and himself, for his own private affairs.

Manual labour is not only the most congenial to his tastes: it is that

which agrees the best with an intellectual worker. Above your toiling

hands, the spirit cheerfully pursues its free play, thanking the hands

for placing it in so cordial a relation with this beautiful material

world, so richly veined, the sight of which refreshes and attracts

it. The day-labourer who treasures his time escapes from the damnable

routine of the salaried work that devours your soul. When you engage

me, I shall do for you everything that a clever, skilful man who puts

his heart into his work can do. But when your work is finished I shall

go back to my own which requires no assistance. I append to my offers

of service a programme of the things you can ask me to do: fence in

your land, plant your young trees, dig, build a wall, set up the frame

of a house, cut your wood, whitewash your walls, hang wall-paper, etc.,

etc., etc.... And if you have a leaking pail or a door that is off its

hinges, I shall attend to them into the bargain. I am not particular.

Work has no terrors for me. There is not an Irish labourer of them

all--you see those strapping fellows who are laying out the ground

about the village for the new railroad?--who has waded in the swamps

as much as I have done, for my own pleasure. It knows me well, that

mud. Tilling the ground for Tom, Dick and Harry for a few days for the

sake of earning five dollars is what you call servile, back-breaking

work. (You tell me this, you who spend the day adding up figures for

an employer, you who bow and scrape to customers from behind your

counter, morning and afternoon, sunshine or snow....) Come! Do you

expect me to shudder at this rough work? Feel the callous on my palms.

You don’t know how cheerily the handle of a pickaxe or a hoe slips

between fingers that have smoothed and stroked it as fellow-diggers and

delvers. Servile labour? Fine masks with white hands, look at Henry

toiling out there in the field if you want to see a fellow whose work

does not enslave him at all. While you are adding up your ciphers or

calculating your phrases, I am adding up my strokes of the pickaxe or

the billhook, and smelling the earth and the turf and the bark around

me. Yes, hire me to do work in my own line and I shall do it less for

the money than for the love of the labour of my hands. Don’t worry, I

shall not give you time enough to disgust me. So take me for what I am

worth, and you will have a workman who will treat you as he would like

to have the other fellow treat him.

Henry looks about him. Who wants a fellow like this? Don’t all speak at

once. If he could secure a day here and a day there it would encourage

him to believe that it is really possible in this world for an honest

man who can do everything to earn his bread. But the lovers of good

work do not seem to be very numerous. Only the friends at whose houses

he drops in for a meal or who stop as they pass him seem to appreciate

the varied talents of a clever young man. And if you only knew what

a pleasure it is, for a fellow who flatters himself that he is no

bungler, to feel that he is appreciated, without any compliments, at

his real worth. As a general thing, you have to work for some dull soul

who naturally takes you for a creature of his own kind; all he wants

for his dollar is the strength of your hoofs and your back, without the

slightest regard for the real extent of your competence. The employer,

in short, in all his worldly splendour.

Suppose he were to try some of those little trades that do not catch

a man up in the greedy machinery of their routine, only to leave him

at the end empty of his pulp, flat as an apple in a cider-press? Henry

has often thought of this. In summer when he sees the boys bringing

back baskets of huckleberries to sell to the important villagers whose

dignity or lofty occupations prevent them from running about the

fields, he says to himself: I am as much of a vagabond as they are....

I should like to do that too. Or he could make baskets, trays and all

sorts of fine, durable, useful things out of birch-bark. Why not? The

manufacture of sand-paper would be lucrative if he could get a few

customers. He invents various contrivances that might be exploited,

such as a rule for measuring cords of wood. But the superintendent of

the city hay-scales in Boston tells him that the wood-dealers would

never hear of this because it would put an end to their swindling. No,

the best thing is to try surveying. Henry has devised his own compass

and chain and is ready to measure other people’s property to the very

confines of the earth. He can be relied upon as a surveyor.

But whether or not the world offers him employment for his faculties,

it will never get him into the mill of “wholesome work,” extolled by

the preachers and held up as an example to the sons of the family. Let

the parish make the best of its bereavement: he has not the makings of

a respectable citizen. “You must get your living by loving”--isn’t that

so, Henry? And not earn your bread by being turned into dough? That’s

the main thing. He will make shift as he can on the ragged edge of

society, if society has no place for an individual like him. Meanwhile,

far from groaning over his lot, he loves it to the very marrow and

would not exchange it for an empire. Concord is richer than all the

empires in the heart of old Asia, and Henry Thoreau, a day-labourer

without a job, feels that he is in the heart of rich Concord, the king

of a limitless country of which every day he brings back a little

of the earth sticking to his boots. Though he may end his days in a

poor-house, nothing can take away this triumphant happiness which he

experiences in living responsive to the instinct that rings in him like

gold.

If you are industrious in your own way and not in the accepted fashion,

you must not be surprised if you pass for a loafer. That is the way

of things. In the eyes of the sober folk around you an inaptitude for

business is the very mark of inferiority. Think of it, an American

who cares nothing about getting on.... What’s more, a Yankee, without

the slightest relish for trading, who seems to be positively bent on

remaining poor.... It’s preposterous, it’s even rather presumptuous.

Among the mandarins of the village there is scant sympathy for this

little whipper-snapper of a schoolmaster who has audaciously pronounced

against the rod and holds aloof from church, charitable circles,

politics. And that surly eye, the gruff tone of his replies and his

cutting words.... When they see him passing down the village street,

under the dome of the great elms, or crossing their fields, a Henry who

lives heaven knows how and seems to have his pockets full of leisure,

the good people sneer, smile knowingly or shrug their shoulders as

much as to say: “You bleed yourself to send a boy to college.... He’s

been spoiled.... Behaving like a millionaire ... running about the

woods all day like a schoolboy, lounging in his boat on the river....

If he had no brains it wouldn’t matter, but he’s clever enough when he

wants to take the trouble, the lazy good-for-nothing....”

If they were able to read the mind of this “lazy good-for-nothing”

who marches along, with head bent, sloping shoulders, clenched fists,

in his old workingman’s togs, they might hear a much finer sermon

for their own sins present and to come. But the good people are a

little hard of hearing, and they would not understand, anyhow! On

the other hand, he has taken their measure as exactly as if he had

used his surveyor’s outfit, when surveying their precious land for

them. If they are “society,” Henry, the simpleton, the ne’er-do-well,

the good-for-nothing, the village fool, is of the unsociable kind.

He sets out for adventure in disgust at money and the evil-smelling

varnish with which money covers existence. There is no spite in this

retirement, none of the peevishness of the misunderstood soul who

has been deceived in his hopes. He goes simply to seek elsewhere the

feeling of another humanity that must exist somewhere, perhaps under

the bark of the trees. Even in the main street of the village, how much

more moving is the presence of the great elms than the fronts of the

neighbouring houses!

Come, good people, would you like to see a savage, a real one, not one

of those of whom your grandfathers told you, whom they perhaps never

saw? Watch this little man passing at the bottom of your pasture,

avoiding the habitations that are set about like snares through the

countryside, on the way to his daily rendezvous. Do not waste your

precious time attempting to follow him, natives of Concord. His

savagery would soon leave you behind.

* * * * *

When you are neither the lawyer nor the doctor, nor even the principal

shopkeeper of the town, you naturally have to go without the legitimate

prestige that attaches to these functions. To be a day-labourer, even

though you are the son of a pencil-manufacturer, is to be condemned to

live outside the luminous circle in which these incontestable powers

move. It is to dedicate yourself to an obscure destiny.

No doubt, but this has its compensations. They are insufficient, you

will tell me; but are you sure of this? The great advantage of being a

day-labourer, free to hire yourself out as you please and cheerfully

pocket your dollar or two, is that you keep the brightest of your

time for your own affairs. These little personal affairs are nobody’s

concern; but, great or small, they are your own. Admit that they have

the same claims as a vocation and everything yields to what is most

important.

Henry’s vocation is to start out every afternoon, rain or shine, for

half the day, three, four hours or more, according to the occasion and

the season, half for adventure, half with an object, in search of....

In search of what, indeed? Does one ever know? Simply in search.

He does not set out for amusement like a sedentary man who is taking

his constitutional; he sets out like an artist towards the studio

where his work is awaiting him. This excursion is the very core of

the day, the condition of the creative hours that will give him his

knowledge and his reward. Ask Henry for anything you wish, money, a

good pencil, a helping hand, but do not suggest that he might sacrifice

his precious afternoon; he will send you packing. The afternoon is

reserved for work, his work. Amid the little tasks of the day, this

is the big affair. Henry punctually responds to the call of the hour,

which has no sound of duty for him: it has a commanding charm. If some

obstacle interferes with his outing, some urgent task or illness, he

is as miserable as a lover who has missed his rendezvous. The day is

spoilt. It is the empty day of one who has failed in his work. And if

he is forced to keep to his room for several days running, he is as

despondent as a girl over a sad story. Henry in a cage feels himself

becoming soft. It is as if he were deprived of his food.

As a rule, he goes off alone, for labours of love demand this strict

intimacy. No annoying person, no idler, no lover of the “joys of the

country” to pester you with his questions, his chatter, when you

are out on business. Not at any price. But when your friend, who

is a congenial soul, accompanies you, there are three of you, for

William’s dog is of the party. The dog hunts for his profit, as the two

companions seek for theirs.

On occasion Henry devotes himself to fishing, but this is rare. He

never hunts any more; he has sold his gun. The game that he starts

to-day is no longer that which he pursued in his boyhood, with his

brother. Instead of the fowling-piece on the strap, he is likely to

carry under his arm, if it is the season for flowers, an old music-book

in which he can press specimens of plants that he wants to keep. And in

his pockets, which are as roomy as wallets, you will be sure to find

his field-glass for observing distant objects, his magnifying-glass

for examining the ground, his big knife, a ball of twine, and perhaps

a bite to eat, if he has set out for the whole day. But you don’t

know him if you think that without the old music-book he would have

any difficulty in bringing back some occasional vegetable discovery.

He drops in at your house for a moment on his way back from some

expedition, and you notice the care with which he sets down his

old straw hat in the hall; its interior is skilfully arranged for

receiving frail plants or flowers without bruising or crushing them.

Henry carries his herbarium on his head and braves under this friendly

protection the rain and the sun. He is indeed equipped from top to

toe for the most perilous expeditions, for the leather of his brogues

is proof against mud and brush. His trouser-ends are thrust into his

boots, a sign that he is not going out for an afternoon call or even

going to follow the main road.

Concord is connected with the world by the roads. A villager only sets

out from the village when his business takes him to some neighbouring

village. What lies between the roads is indifferent to him, unless

he happens to have something to do there. For this reason there are

vast, empty stretches between the roads and around the farms where you

never meet a soul, for no serious man could possibly find anything

worth his while there; haunts of animals, weeds, thickets, mud-holes

and trees that are allowed to grow as they please. The surroundings of

Concord abound in solitudes, and these are Henry’s studio. He has his

favourite nooks and corners where the soil is bad or barren, untilled,

abandoned, chaotic, marshy, with clumps of trees, large ponds, cliffs.

The luxuriant, aromatic vegetation of swampy ground is a feast for him,

for he is a regular glutton, this lean little fellow. Around Fairhaven,

to the South, there are stretches of country that will return to

haunt him in his last hour--Conantum, Baker Farm; and over there,

towards the west, as far as Second Division Brook, one can walk in a

veritable cloud of revelations. It is just the same to the north, the

Easterbrook country, and Mason’s Pasture--abandoned orchards that have

surrendered again to the moss, the rocks and the underbrush, fields of

huckleberries and barberries, and wild apple trees among the birches

and pines. And the Great Meadows and Walden Woods.... And those old

grass-grown roads, wandering at their own will, without a living soul,

without a house or a landmark, their forgotten tracks leading heaven

knows whither, but where you feel so much at home; brotherly roads that

take you by the arm as you leave the village behind and lead you along

till they are lost themselves in the wilderness. The wild grasses that

people call weeds seem sweeter to you than the tractable plants of good

family. They belong to your own family. They like to straggle along the

old roads, just as you do, far from the little gardens where the sober

box-wood grows.

Concord is also united with the world by two rivers, the lively one and

the sluggish one, which are not navigable for trade. The domain of the

waters which, in the spring and autumn floods, lops off an inordinate

amount of the surrounding country, belongs to no one and is free to

all. The two rivers are yours if you want them. Accept their gladness

and their freshness; no one will dispute them with you. That fisherman

over there wants nothing but their fish.

It is towards one or another province of this domain that Henry, freed

from the little tasks of the morning, turns each day with the soul of

an explorer. The house where he has slept and spent the morning between

four walls has a musty smell. He must leave it behind to get the poison

out of his system, set out at midday to receive the shock of the wind

and the sunlight. He is off for discovery. Soon the village and its

rancid taste are far in the walker’s rear.

The point now is to keep clear of the tilled lots that bore him, like

those people who are so cultivated that he wants to turn his back

on them. It is to foil the eye of the house-fronts that are watching

among the trees, to avoid the roads and those people who, flourishing

some phrase of village wisdom, are capable of spoiling his whole day.

By foot-paths and short-cuts known from of old Henry steals between

the farms, like a marauder who is anxious to escape the owner’s

observation. At last he has emerged from the danger-zone; he is on the

threshold of a region where his studious sauntering will be troubled

by no further undesirables. The beautiful hours of the day begin,

the fruitful hours. The inspector visits a corner of the bad ground,

pauses, examines, calculates the harvest. How much this poor soil

yields! And how vast the domain is! Within a radius of ten miles about

the village, the surprises that await him are so marvellous and so

numberless that his whole life will not suffice to exhaust them.

So Henry is the busiest man in Concord. The rest of you on your little

farms cannot imagine the concerns of a great farmer whose lands cover

more than the whole township. Nor can you imagine them, you men of

business. Henry does not close his store on Sundays and holidays. Henry

has no master who employs him. He is an incomprehensible donkey who

works for himself and never stops. In other words, a skulker. Such is

the opinion of those great toilers who, after the day’s work is over,

twist about in their chairs with their newspapers in their hands,

enjoying their poor hours of liberty and fulfilling the rites of the

Sunday boredom. This fellow seems to pay no attention to the rites.

Active in his silence, without appearing to be so, he is off at his

work. He alone knows the demands of this work and the wages. A true

loafer, this lad after whom a certain farm-hand, emboldened by drink,

shouts: “Hello, Mister, what do you think of the walking?”

Henry’s work? Yes, walking, just that. But how explain to this country

simpleton and his kind what walking means for a born walker who

practises the art of walking, with all its emotions, its discoveries,

the great expectations that it arouses and the work at which it aims?

Two, three miles away from the village square you are in the midst of

the unknown, familiar as the place may be to you. In you there awakens

a world of relations that Main Street in Concord has never been able

to set vibrating. It has a reality so strange that sometimes you ask

yourself if the country of the Arabian Nights begins on the outskirts

of Concord or if it is the village ant-heap itself that is unreal.

These streams of living things flowing beyond human control for the

mere joy of being are fragments of a great poem that will find their

completion perhaps only in you--strange man who comes day after day to

surprise them, observe them, weigh their words and penetrate to their

rhythm. All the confidences of which you have been the depository since

childhood have woven between this wild life and your own (less wild?)

a web of intimacy so strong that to break it would be to tear yourself

to pieces. In what language, through what images, can you make the tame

people understand the force of this old passion that drives the heart

of an untamed man into the heart of this wild nature?

The object of your expedition? What does it matter? At the end there

is always some conquest, big or little. Follow the direction that is

indicated by the magnetic needle of your instinct. Perhaps the thought

of some particular chum that you have promised to go and see has

decided you. For you have well-tried friendships out there amid the

waste of trees, weeds and ponds. To-day Henry has passed and heard the

news from this old boy that lives far away over there, like a squire

on his lands. He walks with an alert step, stops, his eye watching,

listens, bends over, picks some flower, examines it, full of spirits,

transformed, his heart high. All these familiar faces salute him as he

passes. He has acquaintances on every side. No one who has known him

at such a moment as this could ever see him as the stiff, purse-lipped

fellow, bored and hardly concealing it, who has to keep such a tight

hold on himself and his sarcastic impulses in polite company. It is

a new man that these friendly presences stir into life. Among his

own kindred he has recovered his humanity. He keeps his wry face for

society. Here he expands, he is himself, he is real. Sometimes it is as

if these open spaces were all one fast friendship that intoxicates him

like a drink between old cronies.

Does all this astonish you? Perhaps the only things you know are the

four walls of your room, the doormat that lies before your threshold

and receives without a tremor the petty dust of your routine, and the

grey ribbon that leads to your daily bread. This may be enough for your

imagination. But confess that you have never set out for an adventure

beyond your dooryard. You have never risen well before dawn to go and

watch the awakening of the water-lilies and bring back a dozen or so

to put in a dish of water; you have never got up at the first peep of

the birds to climb the Cliffs and watch from up there the white sea

of fog strewn with the crests of the mountains like islands of which

you wonder if the inhabitants are not at this very moment watching

your own. At the end of the day, when the summer moon is in its first

quarter, you have never turned towards Conantum to listen to the sounds

of the twilight, while you study through your spyglass the neighbouring

slopes that look as immense as the Andes: a scrap of the song of a

boy on his way home, the trumpeting of the bull-frogs or a horse in

the distance neighing in a meadow. You have never walked miles and

miles at a stretch to go and watch, from one season to another, the

growth of a plant, as many as ten times in a fortnight, making detours

and digressions to pass other great friends of yours. You have not

scrambled up to the summit of a pine-tree to balance there, facing an

astonishing horizon, and climb down again to the ground besmeared with

resin but proud of having picked the unknown flower that opens up there

every summer for the sole joy of adventurous man. You have never even

bent your spine--not once--to study the landscape through your legs and

observe the surprising things in a sky that is hung with pictures of

the earth. No, you have never dreamed of the resources that procure for

a born walker a thousand means of feeling himself live.

Surprised by a heavy rain, he remains for hours under a tree, in the

shelter of a roof of bark that he has made in an instant with his

knife, delightfully occupied in studying the texture of the fiber or

the minute vegetation at the foot of the tree, while the shower tumbles

and splashes the earth about this man who feels a strange well-being

(he never feels less alone than in this laughing cascade of merry

drops).

He finds himself before a clump of shrub-oaks, as compact as a thicket,

and instead of going round it he plunges into it like a savage, going

through it in a straight line, bending down, pushing aside these

branches that are as hard as iron, regardless of rips and scratches on

his hands, regardless even of blinding himself, lost in the embrace of

the foliage but happy in bending its tough arms.

He becomes so infatuated with a swamp that he thinks of remaining for a

whole afternoon weltering in the mud, not to doctor his aching limbs

but for the sheer delight of breathing the rich aromas and listening

to the hum of the insects, not as a stranger, an intruder, but as an

equal, as if he were himself a sweet-flag meditating on the strange

happiness of its fate.

He listens and listens again to the ineffable evening song of the

woodthrush ... _hi willy willy--ha willy willy--o willy oh_ ... which

sounds continually, like a tender prayer to the heart of man that he

may remember, or the _de-de-de_ of the chickadees, trooping about him

as if they were in a playground.

He watches the departure of the balloonists when the ripe down of the

milkweed embarks, free at last, on its great voyage, after having

awaited this moment all summer, one seed crowded against another. He

returns from his expedition in the brush, covered with clinging burs

that absolutely insist upon travelling with him.

He remains for three-quarters of an hour motionless in the most

uncomfortable position to watch a turtle laying its eggs, or to observe

a female nighthawk, rigid on its nest and peering at him through its

all but closed eyelids.

In mid-July, he takes his bath walking, as if on a road, down some

shallow river, his straw hat on his head, the water up to his knees,

then suddenly up to his neck, observing the incidents of the road,

the wayfarers whom he passes, the irregularities of the ground, the

waterplants as shapely as sea-weeds, the molluscs, moving along

like himself, a turtle shambling by, the entrance to the apartments

of a musk-rat and that mother pout advancing toward his naked self

with her procession of infants behind her ... a thousand of them at

least and all so credulous, so confiding ... the mother, frightened

at first by the monster barring her way, returning to them, then

becoming accustomed to the monster ... the little ones approaching and

examining his legs, tickling his toes.... They form such a cloud that

he can no longer see his feet in the clear water.

He takes his boat and listens to the grinding of the oars in the

locks, which evokes for him all the odours and sounds of a harbour,

the swinging of the vessels in the docks, or spends hours on the water

fishing up driftwood that he will carry home and use for making a

trestle to pull his boat up on the shore.

He feels, as he witnesses the felling of a great pine-tree a hundred

feet high and four feet in diameter at the base, as much anguish

of heart as if he were present at an execution, and he curses the

executioner.

He leans with his companion over a rippling brook and sees their double

image, two black heads, as big as thumbs, William and Henry, looking

as if they were bending towards one another in this mirror of convex

bubbles, with the reflexion of the branch of a young elm crowning them.

He feasts like a blackbird on those huckleberries which they call low

blueberries and carries them home by the pocketful, thinking that if

he were a Canadian he would also call them “bluets” and that if he

were a native of the country about Oulme in Normandy, not far from

the home of his great-grandparents, he would say to the little girls:

“Let’s pick some _maurettes_; we can eat as many as we like and keep

the rest for preserves.”... As a connoisseur he runs the whole gamut

of the whortleberry family, the wild grapes and the cranberries, not

forgetting the barberries.

Best of all, in the old abandoned orchards, he gathers those wild

apples that are sour and crabbed enough to set your teeth on edge but

that later, when you eat them after they have been softened by the

frost, refresh your palate with a delectable cider.

He inhales the fragrance of the plants in the moonlight when the

earth is breathing and the sounds have a supernatural delicacy in the

silence, or listens to the hooting of the screech-owls whose wisdom is

older and greater than that of all the sages. He would like to trifle

away the whole night.

He feels that everything has a message for him and is awaiting his

response--the layers on the sides of the railroad cut, the fireflies in

the meadows, thistles, puffballs, migrating birds, and the immutable

mountains that he sees over there by the setting sun with their grassy

slopes where he pastures so often the flock of his thoughts ... as if

the vanished Indians still spoke to him, those Indians who sprinkled

the soil with arrow-heads (look here, one more for his collection) and

left the very embers of their fires intact under a crust of earth.

He is like a trapper who sets his traps after sunset and visits them

before dawn, a skilful trapper who knows the likeliest places and

varies his bait, and keeps from his catch only the thing he is looking

for, a thing that is better than fur or meat.

You think there is nothing here to sustain a man, saturate his life,

fill him with the desire to spend in such company not just a few hours

of afternoon but the whole day? The beings whom Henry comes to visit

may not communicate with the aid of articulate language, but they

have a soul just the same: how happy he would be to find a soul so

expressive among his own kind! Did you suppose that such company was to

be found only in drawing-rooms or the halls of the hotels in the city?

Pretentious human race that regards itself as the salt of the earth! A

little modesty, my neighbours. Out beyond that stretch of space where

the murmur of your words is no longer heard, a man sees and hears many

things, but never one that is absurd.

Think of calling oneself impecunious with the great, beautiful day

before one and this swarming life around Concord! This poor fellow

goes off every day on his visit to the waste lands to watch the

growing things their two mingled poverties yield.... Henry enjoys that

elemental happiness which is the breath of the soul, freed from the

load that burdens it--knowledge, morality, prudence, laws. If he did

not have so much respect for the skin of a tree, he would like to cut

with his knife in the bark of that oak three simple letters: