of the art of living. Whether he is digging in the earth or going off
hunting or fishing with his boy, everything seems to amuse him. The
sacrosanct law of stupefying labour was not invented for him, for he
always consults his own time and pleasure when he works. At the mere
sight of him you forget the ugliness of humanity, you graze the reality
of a life that is strong and leafy as a poem; you are no longer alone
in the world with your dreams and your sadness. Rays of joy that
warm you as you pass, the gift that the poor make to the solitary
walker.... How could you fail to be enlivened after days of misery by
the childlike gaiety of old Brooks who, at eighty, bent double with
age, sets out every day with his basket under his arm to gather a
little wood and whatever else happy chance may offer to cheer his old
days? To-day, dressed in an ancient frock-coat, he has come back from
an expedition, barefoot, an axe in one hand, in the other carrying the
boots that he has filled with apples because his pockets would hold no
more. He has also brought back a thrush with a broken wing that he has
found, and old Brooks is very happy in his find--as happy as yourself
as you stop to hear him tell about it on an autumn evening made still
lovelier by the old man’s delight. Bit by bit he has gathered in two
cords of wood for his winter; but they will certainly warm him less
than this schoolboy’s joy in roaming the countryside which has remained
intact in the heart of a poor old grandfather who blesses the life that
puts thrushes in his path.
Why are there certain beings of whom it is enough to have a glimpse
to be happy? When you meet old Minot and cross a woodlot with him,
everything seems to sing at his mere presence while he tells you
stories of the days when he used to go hunting. One glimpse of his
little cottage on the hillside is enough to make you forget that there
was ever an ugly house in this world; it is the first to show signs
of the coming of spring and the last to bid farewell to the beautiful
season. How easy it is to understand why old Minot has never wanted to
budge from Concord, when even his rheumatism cannot keep him indoors!
It is up there you must hear him, surrounded by the old furniture that
he has inherited from his ancestors, to the tick-tack of a clock that
was sounding before Massachusetts existed, reciting to you the stories
that he knows almost by heart, stories that are engarlanded with minute
details and good old solid and obsolete words that gratify the ear of
an artist. He has a tiny bit of land that he has always cultivated
himself, without help, mingling his work and his pleasure, drawing from
every inch of ground the great happiness it gives him with his bread
and asking for nothing more. He lives with his sister, and his only
regret is that because of his rheumatism he is no longer able to go out
and cut his own wood. But what a clear flame his life yields! He has
the finest ear in the village for the thread of a bird’s note, however
thin it may be. How you would love to toil away for an employer like
that, to be the man-of-all-work for the master of the little house on
the hillside where the spring first breaks!
You perceive, solitary walker, how the ugliness of humanity dies away
at the foot of this hill? And how it vanishes at the foot of other
hills than old Minot’s? You may not have realized this, you who walk
with your eyes on the ground, meditating, but look: the sunlit smile
of this old woman ironing at her window, which is full of blossoming
daisies, cleanses the whole earth as you pass, as if you had never seen
it before. Take a good look around you, as you go through the world.
You may find that it is strewn with men and women whose beauty you
have never suspected and who belong to you as much as Goodwin or old
Minot.
Henry is certainly not at war with humanity when it presents itself in
the form of this wood-cutter who knows the woods so much better than
the finest naturalist: his clothes have a wholesome smell, he is happy
enough for two, and you could work beside him all day. And you would
like to follow old Hayden too as you see him pass and repass with his
team, with the serenity of a good workman. The world of labourers is a
friendly world where you cease to feel that you are among strangers.
There is nothing in them that irritates you; your love of sarcasm
vanishes in their atmosphere; there is nothing awry, nothing that you
could find fault with in them, nothing that is not assured of your
affectionate indulgence. No parlour, no store, no model farm in the
village shelters a face as human as the faces of these Irish labourers,
camping under their plank shanties along the new railroad. Simple
digging-machines, ridiculous louts, in the eyes of noble, pure-blooded
Yankees, are these brawny souls condemned to their killing tasks for
a tiny wage. The scantiness of his own respectability is confirmed
in Henry’s eyes in the friendship he feels for these slow-witted
fellows, navvies, ditch-diggers, scavengers, ice-cutters, indefatigable
executors of the heavy tasks of the earth. To his mind their accent,
their awkwardness, the dirtiness of their big, boyish, sunburnt faces
are far less to be sneered at than the unctuousness of some doctor of
divinity whose hands have never rubbed against anything but a cake of
soap or the Holy Scriptures.
How could one fail to like that big-hearted Michael Flannery who
toils away all day with such bubbling good spirits! It is as if the
more energy he spent the more inexhaustible were the good humour he
has drawn from heaven knows what miraculous fountain in his native
Kerry. Naturally the respectable exploiters of other people’s work
take advantage of this and abuse his simplicity. Michael has won a
prize at the Cattle-show, and the farmer who hires him has taken the
prize-money away from him, maintaining that his wages pay for his time
and that his good luck belongs to his employer: to swindle a lout of
an Irishman is a good Yankee joke that will never shut you out of
the kingdom of heaven promised to prosperous farmers. But this is an
act that completely upsets Henry’s serenity: he immediately takes up
a collection and returns to Michael the money which the miser has
cribbed. And when he sees that little Irish monkey of a Johnny going
to school all alone through the snow from the shanty where his parents
live in the woods, as sober as a judge under the rags that so oddly
cover his four or five years, Henry thinks of the satisfied air of
the alms-givers and ostensible philanthropists who brave the winter
courageously muffled up in their rich fur-coats. What does a mere
little weed of a wood-cutter’s child matter, toddling along without
stumbling through the intense cold with scarcely a shoe on his foot or
a rag on his back, looking as if he found this world royally well made
for little Irish boys who go to school where there is a bench to sit on
and a fire in the stove? And in his mind he strips these worthy rich
folk and puts the rags of the poor Irish on their backs to drape their
philanthropy--takes their purple and fine linen and tenderly envelops
this little scrap of half-naked humanity. Henry himself has no purple
and fine linen to give Johnny, but what he has he takes to his parents:
an old pair of pantaloons and a coat from which Mrs. Riordan can work
up some trousers and a schoolboy’s cloak so that he will not have to
miss school for the futile reason that the snow is too deep this winter.
For the rest, whether it is Irish Johnny or some New England youngster,
the world of childhood is an irreducible power that tolerates no
assumed formality nor any veil of reserve. To make an end of the
“terrible Thoreau,” nothing is necessary but the two black eyes of some
little boy under a big cap or the manoeuvres of four small kiddies
bringing back a big horse from the pasture. You will find then that
he is just a big boy himself, touched, captivated, won, a boy whose
shyness feeds upon solitude and wild nature and who, in order to love
you, asks only to be able to find in you that simplicity and candour,
that true and savoury quality for which his childlike heart is greedy.
Henry feels affectionately sheltered under his own family roof: nothing
in the world could induce him to leave home as his grandfather did for
good and all to seek his fortune far away. But when he meets on his
path these poor, ignorant, simple people, small folk, little souls, a
strange feeling of kinship awakens in him, stronger than the affections
of home, as if at bottom they were his real family.
* * * * *
It was an old desire that had haunted him very often, a desire that he
had cherished no doubt from his childhood, when he had been a great
chief who had withdrawn into his cave to inspect the spoils of conquest
and dream of future expeditions, to go and live alone in some solitary
spot--as Wheeler had done, a fellow at Harvard who had established
himself in a shanty on the edge of Flint Pond to devote himself in all
tranquillity to the study of Greek. A well-tempered character, this
Wheeler, who slept there on the straw like a stableman or a soldier and
later went off to study in Germany, where the poor fellow died. Henry
liked and admired him greatly.
Yes, it was the dream of having some sort of shelter bathed in silence
where he could listen to the things, both within and outside himself,
that were lost in the Babel of the village. He had once been on the
point of realizing it when he had just missed buying the Hallowell
place, the beautifully ruined and solitary old farm he had seen on the
river as he passed in his boat; but he had not come to terms with the
owner and it had remained nothing but a charming fancy sheltered behind
its screen of maple-trees. After all, it was better to have missed this
opportunity, to have been spared the humiliation of seeing his name
printed in the records as a property-owner.
But the old desire had not died. It spoke to-day with more authority
than ever. At twenty-eight, with some experience of the solutions
the world offered for the problem of a livelihood and no inclination
whatever to adopt any of them, there still remained the old question
of supporting himself. His little jobs as an occasional day-labourer
gave him at best a precarious and insufficient means of living. It had
become clearer and clearer that Concord was not very anxious to employ
the particular talents of an “amateur” who undertook to do his work
with the respect of an artist for his art. Well, suppose he were to
free himself from all these needs that were not worth the trouble he
took to satisfy them? Suppose he were to simplify his life?
Existence in his own home, to be sure, was frugality itself. But when
you looked closely, how encumbered it was with superfluities! Cut down,
cut down! This luxury perverts the life of a man. It usurps the place
of true values that only ask for a chance to blossom. The truth of
life is a fragile plant that a gardener should protect against evil
intruders. A house brings with it innumerable duties. A village is a
buzzing, trampled thoroughfare, poisoned with gossip and neighbours.
You could get away by yourself for a few hours, but there were times
when domestic thoughts, village thoughts clung so tight to your skin
that you could not shake them off in the open air and they reduced your
adventure to the vulgar proportions of some cockney’s holiday in the
country. You would give anything to rid yourself of these leechlike
thoughts, not just for a few hours in the afternoon but for good
and all, for days and nights together. You would give anything, for
example, if the first sound you heard when you woke up in the morning
were not to come from some neighbour who is clearing his throat. You
would give anything not to squander so many precious hours, sacrificed
for the privilege of being a citizen who is taught his P’s and Q’s
on the lap of a parish. And what wouldn’t you give not to dream any
longer of the beauty of living, but to experience it completely for a
while, without alloy, unrestrictedly, in all its freshness, free as
the open air, naked and real, from dawn to the day’s end, and the same
to-morrow--to feel that you were _existing_ on this good green earth?
There happened to be other needs that quickened this desire for a
little retirement. Henry had already written a few pages with which he
had reason not to be too dissatisfied. His articles, his studies were
only a prelude, an incentive to exercise himself more rigorously at his
trade as a writer. There too he had to strip himself of vain ornaments
and find out exactly what he was capable of and whether he was really
worthy of doing something. He would work well in this peaceful
seclusion. The outlines of a book were vaguely taking form in the pages
of the Journal. He would see.
Henry needed a retreat, to audit his books with all care and discover
just where his personal affairs stood, to examine various true,
essential matters, including himself, face to face.
It was a more serious business at bottom even than the desire to
clarify his existence and live more or less alone, after his own
fashion. It had the charm of a great difficulty to be overcome; instead
of running away from it or trifling with it, he wanted to come to grips
with it and find out, without any beating about the bush, which was
the stronger. It was a tempting opportunity to prove to himself that
he could provide for his subsistence with his own hands, without aid,
giving himself the beautiful margin of leisure that is indispensable
to a man if his life is to have a meaning and yield its flower. We
shall have a good try, my shopkeeping friends. You set yourself up in
business. Henry is going to follow your example and launch out in an
enterprise of his own, at his own risk and peril, with his ten fingers
and the wits of a ne’er-do-well for his capital. When you are the son
and grandson and great-grandson of merchants, you may turn your back on
your patrimony, but you do not discard from your destiny the taste for
certain kinds of operations. On the other hand, you are not going to
puzzle your brains trying to calculate your profits if you succeed. And
if your speculation is unfortunate, you will still have the pleasure of
telling about your failure.
A boy had been turning these thoughts over in his mind while tramping
over the fourteen acres of woodland which his friend Waldo had bought
for a little more than $200 last September, a spot that had taken
Henry’s fancy above all the paradises of the domain of vagabonds. It
was on the banks of Walden Pond, where the Sage carried his philosophy
into the woods, drawn there by the sound of the name: Waldo ...
Eden....
The circle of sombre branches reflected in the calm blue waters was an
impression that he had preserved from his earliest infancy, and later
it had been the goal of many an expedition. As a child, as a boy he
had run off to go fishing, hunting, skating there, or to stretch out
in a boat in summer, letting himself glide over the water to the waves
of wild foliage that enclosed the pond. The spot had an incomparable
charm and wildness, and although it was only half an hour from the
village it was so retired that all the villages of the earth were lost
and forgotten there in a distance beyond the sea for the explorer who
prowled about its banks. An evil fame, a legendary mirage floated about
these regions--an additional attraction. On the borders of the woods of
Walden, on the neighbouring hill, in former times, all sorts of lawless
characters, pariahs, escaped slaves, negresses who told fortunes and
other riff-raff used to live whose presence in the shadow of the church
would have been an offence to the purity of the village. The blackened
remains of their cabins were still to be seen there. Henry liked to
think of black Zilpha, who spun linen and had such a beautiful voice,
and Wyman, the poor potter, unfortunate souls indeed. But the pond
itself! Sunk in the shelving semicircle, a dark green mass drank in the
deep blue of this miraculous glade under a great stretch of sky. The
whole world was still, and he himself was a flood of silent wonder amid
this population of pines and oaks.
How good it would be to come here and taste the quality of the silence!
Who knew but this pond, meditating in its immemorial solitude, folded
in upon itself in the quiet of the woods, might not have some important
secret to whisper to him, if he became its confidant?... Many a time
on its banks he had dreamed of a Waldenic existence and had taken the
road home again to the village and his old ways. But now the little
voice murmured among the reeds: My secret is not for a boy who has
merely come on a visit. It is for the faithful soul who will come and
live beside me, spending his nights and his days and mingling with
his existence every hour of my own.... The little voice possessed an
all-powerful sweetness for the senses of a lover, a solitary. Yes, to
come and savour there the interminable summer evenings, drink in the
first draught of air before the dawn, allow the winter to blockade him
with snow as he listened to the beating of his heart in the frosty
silence. To plunge into the pond every morning! To feel at home there,
like a wild duck or a skater-insect!... Suppose, instead of the
summerhouse which the Sage planned to set up there, some day, on his
land, he were to build himself at once a house under the pines, on the
side of the knoll that dropped off by a gentle slope into the pond?
When a beautiful castle in Spain that has been tenderly cherished for
years finds a foundation like this upon which to rest, one hesitates no
longer. The business is settled. Spring appears like a notification.
Towards the end of March, in the year 1845 of the Christian era,
Henry goes to his friend Alcott and borrows his axe; it does not cut
very well, this philosophical axe--perhaps it has been blunted at
Fruitlands, in that unhappy phalansterian enterprise--but he undertakes
to sharpen it.
The builder has chosen his site, felled the trees to clear the space
where he is to erect the house. The plan is already settled. Those
pines will do for the framework. The other materials can be found
at little cost. Why new planks when second-hand planks will serve
perfectly well? A labourer’s shanty will give him plenty of timber,
and he will only have to unnail it and transport it with all the
accessories, not forgetting the old nails, which will serve a second
time. For four dollars and twenty-five cents, an Irishman who is
working on the railroad is quite willing to sell him the one he lives
in; it will only be necessary to let the planks dry a little so that
the air can absorb their Hibernian moisture. The materials are all
ready for the work. The cellar is dug in the sand, where the provisions
are to be kept. There is nothing impossible about setting up the frame
for a man who helped his father to build their new house the year
before; no need of a gang of skilled hands to plant a post upright at
the corner where the roof is to rest. But if his friends offer to come
and give him a hand with this heavy job of the timber-work, is he going
to renounce the rare pleasure of working in the woods there with a few
cronies who are not such good carpenters as himself perhaps but who are
full of hearty good will? Alcott and Edmund Hosmer join in the party.
Everything they say sparkles in the resinous air; all the preparations
have taken time and it is May already. A philosopher, a farmer and a
ne’er-do-well in collaboration nail together with affection the frame
of a cabin that is going to support the weight of solitude.
It may be weeks since spring came to surprise old Minot. But it has
been just as long, if not longer, since it took possession of the
heart of a boy who, since the end of March, has turned his steps
every morning, with his lunch in his pocket, towards his workshop in
the woods. The little glade is covered with shavings; the work of
building goes on amid the cheerful clatter of axe and hammer, and the
surrounding pines gaze with a curious eye upon this neighbour who is
coming to live there as if they had never seen old nails driven by
so young an arm. It is only a house that is going up, a motionless
house overlooking a motionless pond, but for the workman, blissfully
alone in the woods.... April, May, June ... the light sings as in
former days when he was building his little boat for those faraway
expeditions--sings a chaplet of songs as long as the work that he
pursues unhastingly on this piney knoll. The cabin is fixed to the
earth by its roots, and it is to shelter the sleep of an explorer who
is promising himself not a week or two but whole seasons of discoveries
and adventures ... seasons that will be reflected in the eye of this
big high window, seasons upon which this door that hangs here will open
with a gesture of welcome and familiarity at the entrance of the cabin
where Henry is going to sleep on this holiday evening--for it is the
Fourth of July.
Up before dawn on the first morning, the builder stops on his
threshold, goes out, takes a turn around his castle, comes in again,
goes out again, looks up at his roof with perfect confidence in its
power to resist snow, sun and rain, and only asking himself if it is
not going to burst with the happiness contained between these four
plank walls. In the woods some neighbours are singing and chirping.
The fresh air pours through him as if he had come out of a tent. But
the cabin is not a tent, it is spacious: ten feet by fifteen. You can
stretch your legs in it. It contains everything: bed, table, a chair
and, at one end, facing the door, a place for the hearth which is not
yet built. The household utensils are in a cupboard. Under the floor,
the cellar, and an attic above, each with its trap-door. The room is
lighted by two windows, one in front and one in the rear. It has all
the comfort and brightness of a living-room with the compact intimacy
of a ship’s cabin.
Thirty to forty square yards of ground, which do not belong to him,
offer their immovable base to this new man who has built the home of
his dreams and come here to sleep and means to sleep here to-morrow
and another to-morrow--who has touched with his feet, as he leaps out
of bed, the realization of his vision, touched it with his hand as he
opens his door, as he slowly makes the rounds to reassure himself that
it is all true, as, from the threshold of the cabin, in the innocence
of the earth, emerging from the summer night, he sees down there forty
yards away the rocky little bay, his haven, the great blue lake and
the woods beyond, nothing but water, sky, waves of foliage, without
the least sign of a human habitation, a whole corner of the world that
has kept itself intact to enchant the eye of a newcomer. Like everyone
else he had had his black and his grey moments in life, but he cannot
imagine at this instant a discontent the vexation of which would
not vanish under the benediction of such a morning, in the air of a
hillside where he has planted his cabin to live an eternity there. He
is not cut off from the world: on the left is the road to Lincoln and
on the right the railroad to Fitchburg. But the squatter cannot see a
roof. He can fancy as he awakens that the human race has gone away for
a time to nurse its sorrows under other skies, leaving the place for
the fresh happiness of a solitary.
Yes, it seems as if one could live here. Everything is clean, there
is none of the litter that encumbers existence. The true wealth is in
the open; you can weigh it, drink it, breathe it; it is solid, fluid,
has a good resinous smell, refreshing as ice-water, fills your arms
like the stones you pile up to build the fireplace. There is so much
to do, in the first place, living is such an absorbing, delightful
occupation, that the most beautiful page you could read would seem like
an impertinence: it would interrupt your collaboration in the poem
of the whole day. You are no longer an afternoon stroller. The slow
task of taking possession of the surroundings demands all your hours,
a continuous employment, going and coming on the path that leads to
the water, observations, saunterings, surprises. But the hours about
the cabin are free from everything you have left out there beyond
the woods, the habits of a household, the family table, the routine
with its taste of pencil-lead, the house-fronts in Main Street, the
regimented faces. They wear new robes, these hours, cut in the workshop
of Walden; they marvel at themselves and their labour is like play.
What is there to do, all the blessed day long, living alone on the
edge of a pond? That is what puzzles those charitable souls beyond the
woods. Ah, good people, if one were alone!... But Henry has never felt
less alone than he has felt since the day when he put that little space
between the village and himself, not for a few hours but for good. He
can feel alone in a Judge’s house but not in a cabin in the woods which
he has built after his own heart. When is there a moment for loneliness
to worm itself into the course of the day? When he is preparing his
meals? Hardly. His main dish every day is a gruel of corn, rye or
rice; the preparation is simple and pleasant. No need of a lot of
saucepans and ingredients, no need to devote himself to those rather
repulsive manipulations that are demanded in expert cookery. And this
is very nourishing too. If he feels like it, the cook may also broil
a little rasher of bacon. When he wants to vary his ordinary diet, it
is quite simple for him to boil some acorns for breakfast as an homage
to the gods of Walden; boiled acorns are a little more bitter than raw
acorns, but you soon get used to them. And what other bitterness can
you imagine a man feeling who does his housekeeping in the open air,
in front of his cabin, where he eats sitting on his doorstep, with his
bowl on his knees and the lake at his feet and the whole day entirely
at his disposal? He has the best of table companions around him, all
drinking to the health of a happy man. Music plays for him, and it is
a different music from that of the human voice. Henry oversees the
baking of his bread, placed in an oven the mouth of which is covered
with stones as unceremoniously as in the days of the ancient Romans.
But the bread that is baked in this way has no flavour of antiquity;
a savoury odour comes from this rustic bakery improvised on a piney
New England slope. How could a baker like this, watching his ovenful
in the open air, feel lonely? Nor is he any likelier to feel so as
he does his housekeeping, chops his wood or sets to work to give his
room a good cleaning. All his furniture is taken outside--there is a
whole wheel-barrowful of it--the table faces the broad daylight without
flinching, the bed stretches itself in the open air, while Henry
carries up buckets of water and scours and rinses his floor with the
water of Walden. Imagine a boy who does his housekeeping under the eye
of the pines, carries his furniture in again when the floor is dry,
happy as a king who is going to sleep to-night in a room that has a
good, well-washed smell--imagine a boy so happily busy feeling himself
forsaken! Solitude may prowl almost anywhere, on the very pavements of
a populous city, but what could it ever find to pick up in the tracks
of a boy like this?
To deserve this life he has chosen he must first make sure of his
subsistence. The cabin is not a philosopher’s country cottage; it is
a farmhouse, and the farmer has his mind on his farm and his harvest.
This bread that smells so good when he takes it out of the oven is not
to be earned by listening to the hooting of the owls. On Emerson’s lot
at Walden there is a stretch of waste land which, with a good deal
of work and a little imagination, he ought to be able to turn into
a field. It is a piece of poor, sandy ground which the woods have
covered for the last fifteen years: virgin soil, still full of stumps
but with plenty of vigour and good will, in which he can have some
confidence--even if it did belong, at the end of the last century, to
a great uncle by marriage who was a deacon. It certainly needs manure,
but he has not come to Walden to apply the methods of model farms. The
labour of his own solid muscles will have to take the place of the
manure, after the clearing, ploughing and harrowing of the ground, for
which the work of a man with his horse and cultivator is indispensable.
Certain expenses are unavoidable in every enterprise.
Henry has sown some potatoes, a little corn, a few peas, a handful of
turnips and a lot of beans, and they all come up--all but the seeds
which the worms have eaten--come up, sprout and form an immense field.
But the weeds, encouraged by the ploughing, also spring up merrily,
and he has to grub them out to protect the life of the beans and his
own honour as a rash adventurer. And what work! The sower has sown his
beans generously, as a farmer who sees things in a large way. He has
rows and rows of them, innumerable rows--seven good miles if he placed
them end to end--four times longer than the distance from the cabin to
the village. On this immense battle-front the general defends the land
step by step. It is very painful for a man of the wilds to see himself
condemned to assuming the defence of culture against these hordes of
barbarians that have grown so beautifully. But what is to be done when
the destiny of a legion of beans, threatened with being surrounded,
hangs in the balance? Since five o’clock in the morning, hoe in hand,
the squatter has been out in his field, first in the dew, then, as the
sun mounts, in the glare of the summer day, weeding, putting fresh
soil about the stems, without giving up till noon, his bare feet in
the burning sand, as steady as a negro in a cotton-field.
The man with the hoe is not slaving away under the eye of an overseer.
He works with a will, first because that is his way, and then because
he is not a hired man but an obstinate soul who means to carry out with
honour a difficult undertaking; he must justify Walden with the sweat
of his brow. Walden is not a phalanstery; there is only one person
responsible for it, and that is much more serious. The villagers who
pass in their carts on the road see a little skinny fellow bending over
his bean-stalks in his half-wild, half-cultivated field and wonder why
this strange workman is breaking his back over such a piece of ground
at such a season. It is Henry the simpleton, toiling away cheerfully
and letting the world go by. He is thinking, under the heat of the
sun, of the sweet bath he is going to give himself in the pond, after
this glorious sweat, and how good it will be to stretch out on his
grassy bank near the spring, in the shade of a vast white pine, with a
book for a companion ... But it is not enough to work himself to death
defending, weapon in hand, these wretched beans that are surrounded
with enemies; the woodchucks, which are very partial to them, eat up a
quarter of your acre. For these blessed beasts the attraction of the
tender shoots is stronger than any fear of the trap; Henry kills one of
them and eats it in revenge. But in spite of all, as the reward of his
labours, the farmer harvests twelve bushels of beans and sells them for
$16.94, plus $4.75 for potatoes. Something of a result!
In all, $8.71½, deducting the original outlay, a total that might not
satisfy one of those knowing souls who go by sneering on the road,
but enough to yield the farmer of Walden a good profit--if he adds it
to the others which, shrewder than these shrewd folk, he gathered in
long before the harvest. The sneerers know all about the sort of soil
that produces a big crop, but what do they know of these magnificent
days of combat for the beans? They have no Ganges in which to cleanse
themselves every morning, to begin the day as if with a prayer; they
have no poor field on a hillside on the edge of the woods, where
you sweat for hours scratching the earth to persuade it to yield
well-podded stalks; they do not know the reward for all the toil of the
toilers of the world, or the delight of feeling one’s skin exhale its
gratitude after the bath and the rubbing. They do not have the rest of
the day for dreaming, observing, wandering, turning their laziness into
thanksgiving, listening to one’s own life amid the throng of things.
They are clodhoppers.
The summer has its great sunny spaciousness in which friendship hangs
like a scarf from every branch. Just wait for autumn and winter, when
some evil animal cowering in the solitude of the cellar comes up
from below or descends slyly from a corner of the attic, in the long
evenings, to clamber up the legs of a solitary in his cabin, or glide
under his shirt and bite him--some insect, some black beetle, some blue
devil of doubt to plague a boy who thinks he can get along without the
village. But there is nothing under this floor but the field-mice, and
they only want the potatoes. And there is nothing in the attic but an
old tent-cloth that dreams of distant adventures and the wide air of
the river-banks. The spiders may have hung up their webs, but they
are the friends of man, weaving decorations for the roof-timbers of a
castle in the woods.
No, there are no foul creatures prowling about this cabin, not even an
importunate cockroach. Henry has made everything ship-shape. A log is
smouldering in the fireplace and the thoughts it has kept shut up till
its last hour surround him, dancing gaily. For the cabin, finished at
last, breathes. A house without a chimney through which you can see
the smoke coming out is not a living house. It is a mere vulgar barn,
a store-house, a dead thing. Before the bad season William comes and
lends his friend a hand in setting up the fireplace; he stays fifteen
days, fifteen beautiful days of comradeship. From now on there will be
wood in the woodshed to keep Henry warm in winter and in the evening
when he sits up late. He is living here like some old bachelor of a
forester who has just finished his supper, his day’s work ended, and
tells himself stories before going to bed. The latter would probably
have his pipe for company, or some yellow-haired mongrel with grave,
tender, vigilant eyes. Henry’s only companions are his thoughts, the
ladies of the house who brush him lightly as they pass as if they were
sisters who had come out with him to the woods. Henry reads or writes
at his table in the deep silence, where the singing of the fire gives
him the feeling of a presence. He revises his manuscripts, works,
writes an essay on Carlyle. He takes a good measure of his inner powers
in the silence of the cabin and toils over a sheet of paper with the
heart of a workman who has swung his hoe through the furrows under
the glaring sun. There are the weeds to be dug out, the beans to be
defended. Sometimes Henry works at his table in the morning, when he is
in the right mood, in the freshness of his strength. At the approach
of spring the red squirrels come and make love under the floor of the
cabin where a solitary meditates in his twenty-ninth year; when he raps
with his foot to silence them, their squeals redouble, as if the lovers
were affirming their rights in the face of this scribbler whom their
gambols do not greatly disturb.
And in winter, when the snow covers the paths and the approaches of the
dwelling, weighs down the pines, weighs upon the roof of the cabin,
when the village is further away than ever, in the overwhelming silence
of the snow and its dazzling splendour, what joy to feel himself in
this hollow in the woods, like a nest stamped with the warmth of his
body, and how the stumps he has toilsomely split repay him for the
difficult time he has spent in loosening the embrace of their fibres!
What joy walking on the stiffened pond, making a hole in the ice with
his axe and bending over the opening, lying flat on his stomach to peep
into the aquarium where the hermit fishes look as if they did not find
it so bad living in Walden, even under this opaque glass that hides the
day from them....
And now, if by chance a friend comes to call on you in the woods, you
can do him the honours of your castle. When there are two between the
bed, the table and the fireplace, the reception-hall is almost filled,
but it is large enough to make room for this chance accession. One
Sunday it is dear Edmund Hosmer--no miserly peasant, that fellow--who
comes to look in on his colleague, the farmer of Walden; or his son
Joseph perhaps, whom the latter has invited to come for a feast at his
table. On this occasion there is a choice of dishes and the cook has
surpassed himself. You cannot do too much when you are entertaining
one of your own kind. He has prepared a banquet: fish from the pond,
beans, corn, bread from the Walden bakery, all seasoned with that fine
salt of which there is always a full box at Henry’s. It is Sunday twice
over in the cabin. Nor does Alcott refuse to make it the object of a
walk to go and see one of the two or three friends with whom alone he
can embark on one of those endless conversations in which time and
space are abolished. There is not much philosophical talk at Walden;
you don’t press wisdom there between the leaves of an old book; you
live it, freshly every day, as naturally as you turn to the water in
the pond. But with the master of the axe that Henry borrowed to fell
the pines for his house, what a feast he has! The bean-field is soon
left behind; they are in full flight, and in a few hours they have
surveyed numberless continents and unknown archipelagos. If the visitor
is only William, who lives a good three miles from the pond but whom
neither snow nor storm can stop when the fancy seizes him to go and
say good morning to his friend, there are no culinary preparations or
voyages into the empyrean: there are simply orgies of laughter in the
hermitage. They must say and do all sorts of foolish things to express
their joy in finding themselves there in the woods as brothers, free
from bores. How the laughter resounds in the cabin on the hillside!
Listening to the response that comes from the heart of the woods, you
might think it had been built just for this day.... They chatter like
magpies, they chirrup louder than those amorous squirrels, they roar,
their boisterous mirth shakes the plank walls. They have no good old
wine to drink as they eat their dishes of gruel, nothing but a nut to
put under their teeth. But they are able to intoxicate themselves just
the same, with the pure gaiety of old cronies.
Now and again some prying busybody also comes to the woods. A boy who
has had a little experience of the world knows various tricks for
getting rid of these gentry--though they are not always successful.
But what a charm spreads about the cabin when other visitors pass,
those strolling railroad men, for instance, who are not afraid to
violate the Sabbath occasionally by turning in towards the little house
in the woods. They are quite a gang, half a dozen of them, walking
together and stopping in as neighbours, for Henry often meets them on
his comings and goings along his boulevard, the railroad. They have
put on their white shirts and saunter along, airing their leisure and
waving their Sunday idleness like a little twig one cuts on one’s way,
the older ones with seamy faces, the younger giving you a friendly
greeting and wishing you good luck, without showing the least surprise
that a man prefers the company of the pines to that of the villagers.
The language and bearing of some of these fine fellows reveal that
exquisite, simple, unaffected courtesy that bears the stamp of the
workingman and leaves you with the impression that you have received a
visit from great personages.
One of those good apostles of the village who knows Henry only as a
harsh, dismal mask should pass at a moment when his tempestuous laugh
is sounding over the knoll; he would understand better then what this
mock hermit has come to seek in the woods. Henry has not broken with
the world. He is simply holding it at a distance for a while in order
to find space for something he wishes to create. Almost every afternoon
the anchorite-in-his-own-fashion crosses the woods and descends again
among men. There is an unimaginable charm in taking a trip of this
kind as a simple visitor into the regions of the civilized, where he
sees human faces. When you have behind you a cabin that is waiting
for you in the heart of a kingdom of your choice, the Main Street of
the village is as pleasant as possible. You see the strangest things
there and you judge everything indulgently, for you see it from another
point of view. You have all the enjoyment of a traveller in a foreign
town, observing the manners of the natives, the sights, the shops,
the fashions, the things for sale. Henry, in spite of his change of
domicile, remains on the same old intimate terms with his family and
stops in regularly to see if everything is going well at home, lend
a hand in the workshop, if it is necessary, or busy himself a little
in the garden. When he goes home again he sometimes has to carry some
tidbit cooked for him by his mother, who is rather afraid that the
gruel at the cabin may be too slender a diet for a boy accustomed to
the family table. Sometimes too, at the end of the day, if the fancy
takes him, Henry knocks at a friend’s door and invites himself to
supper, as the bearer of the latest news from the woods; then if night
has fallen on the road, as he gropes his way through the darkness
after the evening he has passed with his friends, it only deepens the
serenity of his return. And this is not to mention the times when, even
for a man who has no complaint to make of his business, a dollar comes
in very nicely and he undertakes to go down and work for a day or two
in the village as a painter, gardener or mason. It is just so much to
add to the revenue of the farm.
The farmer of Walden does not deposit his wealth in the bank like big
landowners and prudent citizens. These good people lock their tills
and bolt their doors for fear of robbers. They are so afraid of being
relieved of a crumb of their bothersome money! When Henry leaves home
for a whole day, and even when he sets out for several days on some
distant excursion, it never occurs to him to lock his door. One bother
the less. The door of the cabin has neither lock nor bolt; nothing but
a latch. It is open to all comers. The scorner of men has confidence
in humanity, in the unknown. Come in, gentlemen, if you happen to be
passing, and you too, Mrs. Paul Pry. Inspect the bed, the fireplace and
the cupboard. A little something to eat? Eat to your heart’s content.
You will find a dipper to fetch the water if you are thirsty. Make
yourself at home. And if you have a mind to, after the feast, read a
page in one of those books lying there on the table. It will not do you
any harm. And if you like the book so much that you don’t want to leave
it, take it away with you. It has gilt edges; the man of the woods
makes you a present of it. The principal of his worldly wealth is there
between those planks. But what are the sneak-thieves thinking of? They
never come to Walden.
One evening, when he sets out for the cobbler’s to take a boot to be
repaired, the village resorts to a singularly rough way of testifying
its regret at no longer seeing him except as a passing stranger. The
town constable places his hand on Henry’s shoulder and takes him off
to jail. He has refused to pay his poll-tax. His intention in doing so
was to protest against a power which protects the purchase, the sale,
the practice of dealing in men, women and children, those colonial
wares from Africa--and which, on the other hand, makes war on one of
its neighbours in order to seize its territory. To say “no” flatly to
the tax-collector is a much more serious matter than to refuse to pay
the tax of a parish of which one is not a parishioner. It is revolt,
disloyalty, the crime of treason, the perverse act of a bad citizen who
disowns the institutions and the enterprises of his country. Off with
his head!
So here is a boy who only wants to return to his home in the woods
and who is invited to spend the night in the middle of the village
in a beautiful stone house. Modest as he may be, this pressing and
irresistible way of showing him that he is indispensable to the
equilibrium of the village does not fail to touch his pride a little.
They lodge him in a princely fashion, for this is not the old wooden
jail where, in the days of the Revolution, two of Henry’s great-uncles
were imprisoned as Loyalists--and from which their sister, his
grandmother Jones, coming from Weston to bring them something to eat
in prison, helped one of them to escape. No, the world has made great
progress since then, and the jail is in harmony with the world.
On the threshold of the fine modern building, Henry is accosted by
his friend Sam Staples, whose cheery bluster is not insensible to the
honour of receiving under his roof the son of the pencil-manufacturer.
A former innkeeper, Sam adds to this quality the importance of
the part he plays in the village; he is at once the jailer and
the tax-collector. He is almost everything but a deacon. Sam is
also the son-in-law of the innkeeper celebrated by Henry in one of
his best pieces, published three years before in the _Democratic
Review_. Sam owes it to himself and his father-in-law to be polite
in return to Henry. His first remark is: “I’ll pay your tax, Henry,
if you’re hard up.” The pity is that Henry is by no means hard up
and does not want money. The only thing he wants is to go to jail to
meditate at leisure on the beauty of the institutions of his country.
Walden is not propitious for this meditation; the hours there are
too precious to be wasted in such unclean thoughts. But in this
beautiful stone edifice, behind the stout, bolted door, he is in a
better position to think of his country, and its laws and law-makers,
while he is held there between four firm walls, under the guard of a
jailer-tax-collector-ex-innkeeper who is going to sell him at auction
perhaps like a mere negro for refusing to bow down to an enslaving and
conquering State.
The noise of Henry’s arrest spreads through the village. Waldo hastens
over to see his friend. The Sage is a little shocked; it spoils the
harmony of his universe to find Henry in such a place. “Henry, why
are you here?” “Why are you not here?” the prisoner replies with the
cool impudence that great criminals have. You can be a sage and yet
never be able to understand certain things. The best thing Henry can
do is to remain in the company of his own thoughts, which, in spite
of this magnificent masonry that seems destined to annihilate them,
have not lost a jot of their serenity and their liberty. Yes, and to
talk with his cell-companion, an honest soul, accused of having set
fire to a barn, who had been imprudent enough to go to sleep there in
the straw when he was drunk with a lighted pipe in his mouth; or to
listen to this other prisoner, whose voice comes from a neighbouring
cell and who never stops repeating in his misery: “What is life?... So
this is life!”... Through the safe bars of the skylight there comes
to you the clear sound of the village bell, a strange sound to hear
in this way from behind these prison walls and this bolted door. You
have never felt so close to the soul of the village, so close to its
citizens, to the beautiful souls of the builders of the prison, the
makers of laws, the buyers and sellers of human flesh, the plunderers
of other people’s territory. This voice of the bell, falling in the
naked intimacy of a jail, is just the one thing necessary to strip you
of the last shred of respect you have kept, without being aware of it,
for these blessed institutions. The prisoner actually has a feeling of
deliverance: when he first came in he did not perceive that the parish
was really imprisoned on the other side of those bars and that he had
been summoned there as a judge to judge it.
A man can find his happiness anywhere if he has room for happiness in
himself. Many a time Henry has said that he would be able to live very
well in an almshouse, among the humble souls whom one saw about the
grounds of the Poor Farm. He is quite ready to remain Sam’s boarder
till Authority recognizes that it has made a bad blunder. But he has
reckoned without the indiscreet solicitude of his family, who are
all in a flutter over the incarceration of their Henry. While he
is meditating in his dungeon, his good Aunt Maria hastens out after
nightfall, concealing herself in a neckerchief to avoid scandal, and
deposits the sum which the tax-collector demands, plus the costs. All
the serenity which his evening in prison has confirmed in this enemy
of the laws vanishes at dawn when the jailer comes in and tells him of
this transaction. The beautiful stone building is to lodge him only for
one night; he must leave it. Sam is very happy to set this sympathetic
boarder free, but the latter is furious at finding himself betrayed by
his own people. Confound them! So he leaves. The village has become
odious to him. When he goes to the cobbler’s for his boot, he exhibits
on the visage that he reveals to the gaze of his sly fellow-townsmen
the defiance of an army marching, with flags unfurled, through a
conquered country. That evening the discharged prisoner looks like a
man who has come back from a long journey. As a matter of fact, in
order to efface the memory of that night and that awakening and the
humiliation of that enforced release, he has gone off and spent the day
gathering huckleberries.
* * * * *
Inestimable hours of Walden! Do you really imagine, you poor simple
souls, that he has nothing to do here, nothing more important than to
contemplate the image of his own blessed purity in the mirror of the
pond, or to listen to himself playing his flute on the water amid this
encircling verdure? It is perfectly true that the pond is a liquid
gem, where the mysterious little rayed breem lives, as perfect as a
jewel. It is not bottomless, as the good people say. Your sounding-lead
touches the bottom in more than a hundred places--a bottom of pure
sand, without mud--and you can draw up an outline of its basin. But
how far the discoveries you make here surpass the miracle of its
limpidity! Why does this prowler about the woods find more soul in
these desert places than among his own brothers, the bipeds of the
villages and cities? Is it possible that a narrow-chested fellow
with sloping shoulders carries the whole load of it on his own back,
scattering it about the roads as he passes? And so saturates the earth
with his own feeling as to make it murmur, sing, pray, utter words,
force it to say what its religion is? Or does the human quality reside
in a diffused state under the bark of the trees and in the sap of
plants for the soul of this vagabond to collect it and feed upon it?...
In any case, every hour at Walden is like the measure of sand passed
through the sieve of a gold-seeker; it leaves enough of a residue to
make a boy comfortable for the rest of his days.
These fresh things that flow about the cabin surprise him in the midst
of his labours with a beauty so pure and so exultant that he is obliged
to drop his spade, his book or his housekeeping, sit down on the
doorstep and simply surrender himself to the unknown things that are
passing. You would say then that the earth had chosen this poor, shy
boy whom you see absorbed there, on the threshold of his cabin, as an
instrument for thinking in peace of its own unity and eternity. How can
he say where he is? The planet is silent, time and space are strangely
annihilated, the notion of any journey is lost, he may be at the
antipodes. Under the pines of Walden, this man who is lost in his dream
is Mir Mohammed Ali, perhaps, the painter of Ispahan; his American
profile is drawn in miniature in the colours of a precious stone on
the blue of the pond. Or is he some Chinese poet-philosopher in whom
mingle the souls of animals and plants and hermits sitting under an
arbour near a little lake? There comes to this man, as he listens to
sound beyond sound, a music that is deeper and more ample than the
music of his everyday life; he feels on his palate as it were a taste
of immortality--it grows clearer than the clear morning about him. This
beetle that buzzes by, this sweetflag swaying on the pond are like
messengers charged with transmitting to him the friendship of men who
have dreamed the same dreams in the depths of the old Orient. He knows
those men, he has invited them now and again in the evening to come
and bear him company under his roof; they have never felt out of their
element or constrained in a cabin as big as one’s hand in the open
woods. And the beautiful stories they have told him are not discordant
with the cry of the whip-poor-will.
At such moments as these, you would take him for a fellow who has
laid his hoe aside like a workman about to take his rest. In reality,
he is a man in ecstasy, ravished by this miracle, and his life grows
more and more exalted and ascends in a perfume of thanksgiving till
his contempt for the little men whose stupidity has made him flee is
unravelled like smoke in the wind. Some fine morning he will find them
almost rehabilitated in his eyes: in the first rays of the sun, at the
first notes of the thrush after the winter, it will be the end of all
that; there will be nothing left under the pines of Walden but a man
who is all feeling and who is ready to pardon his kind for being such
sorry automatons, repeating their mechanical gestures in the dullness
of their days. This light of early dawn will be enough to set shining
at the bottom of their poverty a precious spangle which they themselves
do not know they possess, and which redeems all their shabbiness.
Two such years as these, two full years quite to himself, far from
every discordant sound, impregnate the very tissue of an existence. The
anchorite can leave his cabin. Very foolish would be the person who
supposed that the experience of his life in the woods had played him
false. It had crowned him. To have proved to himself that a man, when
he wishes, can be entirely self-sufficient without hiring out either
his arms or his head, was one result: but he had derived something else
from it as well. He had not only provided for his needs; he had learned
how to economize. He could choose, according to his mood, like a man of
leisure: return and stay with his fellowmen or remain by the pond.
At the end of the third summer he abandoned the cabin to the squirrels.
Why, exactly? Will those who know be good enough to tell him? He
scarcely knows himself. Changing one’s dwelling-place is a vestige
perhaps of the old migratory instinct. Was he right or wrong in
leaving? Did he have any reason to regret it? Vain questions.... He
simply went away in 1847 as he had come in 1845. But aside from this?
Perhaps because it was better that an all too beautiful experience
should be interrupted before habit destroyed its freshness. Or merely
because he could not resist the invitation of a great friend who begged
his old right-hand man to come and live in his house again during his
second voyage to Europe.
For Henry Waldo’s house was like another home. He had spent two happy
years there; he would be glad to spend another eight or ten months.
During his stay in the woods he had read to Waldo, under an oak on
the bank of the river, some pages from the book he was preparing. He
would be able to work in the Sage’s house. He intended to include in
this book a piece on friendship that he would be able to write most
fitly under the roof of a perfect friend. On October 5th, Henry went
to Boston to see the traveller off and say good-bye to him in his
stateroom. (How small and dark it was after the cabin!) The boat was
called the “Washington Irving”--a favourable augury. The great man
was going to deliver some lectures before the choicest spirits in
England. He was going to see Carlyle. He planned to make a tour of the
Continent, stopping at Paris. Bon voyage, and may the gods of Concord
protect you, dear Waldo. Have no anxiety about the garden or your
family.
Once more in the little white house the children find their Henry.
Ellen has become a personage of eight; Eddy, a new personage, is three
and a half. And the parties begin again. The right-hand man has not
forgotten in the woods how to win the confidence of childhood. When
they turn over together the pages of a picture-book, the savage takes
as much interest in them as the little figures perched on his knees. He
is on very good terms with Ellen. He must never ignore these important
details in giving the traveller the news of the little house. It is the
middle of November, a good time for long letters. In a hand not always
easy to decipher but one which the recipient will read without any
hesitation, Henry writes to his friend Waldo:
I am but a poor neighbour to you here,--a very poor companion am I.
I understand that very well, but that need not prevent my _writing_
to you now....
I have banked up the young trees against the winter and the mice,
and I will look out, in my careless way, to see when a pale is
loose or a nail drops out of its place. The broad gaps, at least,
I will occupy. I heartily wish I could be of good service to this
household. But I, who have only used these ten digits so long to
solve the problem of a living, how can I? The world is a cow that
is hard to milk--life does not come so easy,--and oh, how thinly
it is watered ere we get it! But the young bunting calf, he will
get at it. There is no way so direct. This is to earn one’s living
by the sweat of his brow. It is a little like joining a community,
this life, to such a hermit as I am; and as I don’t keep the
accounts, I don’t know whether the experiment will succeed or fail
finally. At any rate, it is good for society, so I do not regret my
transient nor my permanent share in it.
Lidian and I make very good housekeepers. She is a very dear sister
to me. Ellen and Edith and Eddy and Aunty Brown keep up the tragedy
and comedy and tragic-comedy of life as usual. The two former have
not forgotten their old acquaintance; even Edith carries a young
memory in her head, I find. Eddy can teach us all how to pronounce.
If you should discover any rare hoard of wooden or pewter horses,
I have no doubt he will know how to appreciate it. He occasionally
surveys mankind from my shoulders as wisely as ever Johnson did.
I respect him not a little, though it is I that lift him up so
unceremoniously. And sometimes I have to set him down again in a
hurry, according to his “mere will and good pleasure.” He very
seriously asked me, the other day, “Mr. Thoreau, will you be my
father?” I am occasionally Mr. Rough-and-tumble with him that I may
not miss _him_, and lest he should miss _you_ too much. So you must
come back soon, or you will be superseded.
Alcott has heard that I laughed, and so set the people laughing, at
his arbour, though I never laughed louder than when I was on the
ridge-pole. But now I have not laughed for a long time, it is so
serious. He is very grave to look at. But, not knowing all this, I
strove innocently enough, the other day, to engage his attention
to my mathematics. “Did you ever study geometry, the relation of
straight lines to curves, the transition from the finite to the
infinite? Fine things about it in Newton and Leibnitz.” But he
would hear none of it,--men of taste preferred the natural curve.
Ah, he is a crooked stick himself. He is getting on now so many
_knots_ an hour. There is one knot at present occupying the point
of highest elevation,--the present highest point; and as many
knots as are not handsome, I presume, are thrown down and cast into
the pines. Pray show him this if you meet him anywhere in London,
for I cannot make him hear much plainer words here. He forgets
that I am neither old nor young, nor anything in particular, and
behaves as if I had still some of the animal heat in me. As for the
building, I feel a little oppressed when I come near it. It has
no great disposition to be beautiful; it is certainly a wonderful
structure, on the whole, and the fame of the architect will endure
as long as it shall stand....
I have had a tragic correspondence, for the most part all on
one side, with Miss--. She did really wish to--I hesitate to
write--marry me. That is the way they spell it. Of course I did
not write a deliberate answer. How could I deliberate upon it? I
sent back as distinct a _no_ as I have learned to pronounce after
considerable practice, and I trust that this _no_ has succeeded.
Indeed, I wished that it might burst, like hollow shot, after it
had struck and buried itself and made itself felt there. _There was
no other way._ I really had anticipated no such foe as this in my
career.
I suppose you will like to hear of my book, though I have nothing
worth writing about it. Indeed for the last month or two I have
forgotten it, but shall certainly remember it again. Wiley &
Putnam, Munroe, the Harpers, and Crosby & Nichols have all declined
printing it with the least risk to themselves; but Wiley & Putnam
will print it in their series, and any of them anywhere, at _my_
risk. If I liked the book well enough, I should not delay; but for
the present I am indifferent. I believe this is, after all, the
course you advised,--to let it lie.
I do not know what to say of myself. I sit before my green desk, in
the chamber at the head of the stairs, and attend to my thinking,
sometimes more, sometimes less distinctly.
I trust a common man will be the most uncommon to you before you
return to these parts. I have thought there was some advantage even
in death, by which we “mingle with the herd of common men”....
Oh, yes, he must also send him the news about Hugh, the gardener,
who has been intending to buy Henry’s cabin and the old bean-field.
The fruit-trees he promised to plant there are not set out yet. Hugh
is busy elsewhere: on the day after the Cattle-show he was among the
missing. The same old story, too much beer.... The field at Walden is
in good hands.
* * * * *
They have had a peace meeting here.... Some men, Deacon Brown at the
head, have signed a long pledge, swearing that they will “treat all
mankind as brothers henceforth.” I think I shall wait and see how they
treat me first. I think that Nature meant kindly when she made our
brothers few. However, my voice is still for peace. So good-bye, and a
truce to all joking, my dear friend.