CONCORD, December 22, 1854.
MR. BLAKE,--I will lecture for your Lyceum on the 4th of January next;
and I hope that I shall have time for that good day out of doors. Mr.
Cholmondeley is in Boston, yet _perhaps_ I may invite him to
accompany me. I have engaged to lecture at New Bedford on the 26th
inst., stopping with Daniel Ricketson, three miles out of town; and at
Nantucket on the 28th, so that I shall be gone all next week. They say
there is some danger of being weather-bound at Nantucket; but I see
that others run the same risk. You had better acknowledge the receipt
of this at any rate, though you should write nothing else; otherwise I
shall not know whether you get it; but perhaps you will not wait till
you have seen me, to answer my letter (of December 19). I will tell
you what I think of lecturing when I see you. Did you see the notice
of "Walden" in the last _Anti-Slavery Standard_? You will not be
surprised if I tell you that it reminded me of you.
* * * * *
On the Christmas Day that Thoreau reached New Bedford, he had left
home in the forenoon, as usual in his Cambridge visits, spent some
time at Harvard College, and gone on by the train in the afternoon,
which accounted for his delay. His host, who then saw him for the
first time, says:--
"I had expected him at noon, but as he did not arrive, I had given him
up for the day. In the latter part of the afternoon I was clearing off
the snow from my front steps, when, looking up, I saw a man walking up
the carriage-road, bearing a portmanteau in one hand and an umbrella
in the other. He was dressed in a long overcoat of dark color, and
wore a dark soft hat. I had no suspicion it was Thoreau, and rather
supposed it was a peddler of small wares."
This was a common mistake to make. When Thoreau ran the gantlet of the
Cape Cod villages,--"feeling as strange," he says, "as if he were in a
town in China,"--one of the old fishermen could not believe that he
had not something to sell. Being finally satisfied that it was not a
peddler with his pack, the old man said, "Wal, it makes no odds what
't is you carry, so long as you carry Truth along with ye." Mr.
Ricketson came to the same conclusion about his visitor, and in the
early September of 1855 returned the visit.
On the 4th of January, 1855, Ricketson wrote, saying, "Your visit,
short as it was, gave us all at Brooklawn much satisfaction;" adding
that he might visit Concord late in January, when he expected to be in
Boston. Thoreau replied:--