Chapter IV (1)

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:

H H H

_Henry Happy Heathen._ It would be a curious design on the bark and would recall those mysterious signs which the Indians engraved to mark their passing. Or Three Hatchets, to puzzle passers-by still more. And then dance a wild jig around the tree at the thought of the beautiful epitaph there, to be cut off some day and set on a flat stone among the crosses and urns in a graveyard.

He is happy without reason, because things are as they are ... happy just as the river is happy as it hastens to join its great sister and run with her down to the sea ... or as the leaves of the poplar, fluttering as they prattle the news which this gay little wind has whispered to them as it passed. In the delight that he shares with all these things he strews the landscape with imaginary beings after his own heart. There are whole families of them of whom he has never caught so much as a glimpse, but who, as he knows, live there in the spots where his dreams place them. From afar he greets them as he passes, sure friends who must not be disturbed at their work or in their serenity; it is enough to know that they are there. Their presence helps him to endure cheerfully the misery of the town.

With his own happiness chinking down in his pockets like an arrow-head against the steel of his knife, Henry marvels that he never encounters anyone on his expeditions. So he is the only one to profit by all this? Not one of his own kind dreams of disputing his pleasure with him. I am greatly obliged to you all. How kind of you to abandon the earth to me, while you, sober souls, measure cotton behind your counters or spend the whole afternoon sitting with your legs crossed on your bench like a penitent! Take care or some green sprig may thrust itself between the pages of your existence; this would spoil the pious images that slip into your book. Work on, and let me carry off in peace what you despise. You will not prevent a lad who is up earlier than you and passes your yard in the moonlight without waking you from drawing from your land the profits he is pleased to put into his own pocket. Let each have his own share: you bear the costs and the risks and take the money, and he in his poverty will collect the tithe. The hail that ravages your harvest will be music in his ears. You will never believe it; but unaware of it as you may be, it is for him that all your work is done, good people. You think you are the possessors, but it is he who possesses you.

Henry exercises with impudent freedom the privileges that are common to all men. He has not surrendered for the ownership of a miserable field or two his claims to the whole earth. Henry knows his rights. He will build a fence for you now and then at so much a yard, but you cannot talk to him about Holy Property.

Henry is the largest farmer in Concord. He collects the revenues of a whole township. There are other men in this world who, through carelessness or lack of skill, utterly fail to perceive what belongs to them by right. They are the indifferent souls who forget to take their share of the spectacle of the setting sun, the beauty of men and women, the sea, the day, the night, the trees, the lands of their neighbours. Well, it is for them that the little god with the big boots, the great nose, the thin chest, the long arms and the sloping shoulders collects the inalienable share of the common property.

Suppose, some day, the village authorities, perceiving the value for everyone of these journeys of a little god who so carefully keeps up the forest paths and maintains the right of way wherever men might like to go, were to coax him into accepting an appointment, as, let us say, Conservator of Waste Lands or Inspector of Swamps or Curator of Indian Relics? Something like a liaison officer between the wilderness and civilization. Of course they would have to be tactful and appoint him without any formal appointment. For in what form could they make him accept the frightful idea of being any kind of town official! With a little imagination they might be able to find the formula that would permit him to remain his own free self and yet receive a small allowance just the same. Perhaps a little fund, or a commission, as in the case of an explorer.... Yes, assuming that you could find in the bosom of the town-council the slightest sense of these fine shades. Hm ... let’s not be too sanguine about it. But what a fine thing it would be for the town to be assured for some trifling sum of the services of a young man who has an eye for these treasure-chests to which everyone can go and take what he likes when he feels his soul in a cage behind the bars of his dull days.... Have you no sense of your own interest, you poor silly people? He demands nothing, he complains of nothing. He has had his choice and finds that he is amply indemnified for having squandered all his capital in tilling the wastes; but it would be rather nice now if they were to assure him a pittance.... So Henry dreams and scatters his fancies to the wind along his path. Yes, of all possible employments it strikes him that this is the one he would have accepted most gladly, for he is prepared for it by a long apprenticeship, and he could put into it so much of himself, so much love.

If it is for the sake of one young man of Concord that the seasons arrange and vary their pageants, you may imagine what obligations this favour imposes on him. Henry sets out in all weathers, from one year’s end to another, favoured by a porous soil that is sandy enough to absorb the water. The festival of summer offers the most plentiful programme, of course, for there is room then for the longest of processions from dawn till dusk, and the manager of the show is a spendthrift. It dazzles us and leaves us with the impression of an unequalled pomp when, after its mad extravagance, it has vanished in a golden stream, sounding a glorious fanfare amid the blazing bonfires of October. The illumined brow of the tiniest hill is a murmur that mounts, swells, ends in a clamour of farewell to the great artist who is disappearing. Every tree unites in this in the words of its own language and the accent of its spot of soil. Listen.... The hickories express their thanks with orange words, the oaks cry out in scarlet that makes the blacksmith’s forge seem pale, the maples shout with a mad note of crimson and yellow that spreads panic among the sober-minded. A red flag unfurled would disappear in the fires of this conflagration.

It is as if a whole wild race of beings at the point of death were confessing at last without reserve the delirious thoughts of the year that have ripened in the August sunlight. Every weed, to the very rim of the forest, every leaf tries, before it vanishes, to be as sumptuous and beautiful and tempting as a flower. Even in the streets of Concord, under the golden ruin of the great elms, one asks oneself how the passers-by can still cherish such beggarly thoughts. Then Henry’s eyes, gorged with the purple, the red, the lemon-yellow, the flame-colour, do not lose a crumb of the feast. They devour the oriflammes of the great flag-day, offered once a year to children and barbarians to satisfy their joy in lively colours. And at this season, when the villagers no longer go into the woods and he is alone under this great rose-like oak, the deep scarlet of which forms so intense a contrast to the green of the pines, he feels stirring in himself a veritable troop of bohemians, good-for-nothings, ne’er-do-wells, burning to join hands and dance, shouting as if possessed.... The long festival of summer at its mad end! It returns later, appears for a moment to offer a last farewell, with a calm, purified serene magnificence, in the golden days of Indian summer with their flavour of ripe fruit, ruddy, sweet and sunny.... Yes, the summer bears on its brow the assurance of its triumph; it has the easy pride of wealth. But the other seasons.... Are you so blind as to ignore them?

Admit for yourself that you have never discovered what a different face the seasons wear at home from that which they wear in the calendar. You may know what it is to walk with great strides over a bed of dead leaves, hearing them whisper like a crowd in a church at the entrance of some expected personage. But it is a safe wager that you know nothing of the real quality of those naked, desolate, paralysed days at the end of November when a man feels that the best thing he can do is to stay in his own hole, that there can be absolutely nothing for him to glean amid this death of all things. But Henry has set out just the same, without much hope in his heart; and lo and behold, in the course of the journey through this windy desert a beautiful surprise is waiting to feed and enchant his imagination. He returns with the sunlight in his heart, “as if from an adventure.” What he has seen it has required the nakedness of this dying November to permit him to discover, and it is the very thing perhaps that he has been vainly seeking so long in the abundance of the year. There is not a living thing abroad but himself, not an insect, not a flower, not a reflexion of real light, and here is this wandering lunatic, marching along with his hands in his pockets, waiting for the dismal day to confide to him for safe-keeping the particles of illumination and warmth that are hidden under its desolate exterior. At this season, when the wild geese pass in echelon, a thousand sometimes in a single day, the fancy seizes him, when he is out of doors, to imitate their cry. The means are at hand. You flap your elbows against your sides, then utter through your nose, with your neck stretched out: _snowack_. It is so good that a flock on their journey up there are positively deceived by it and do you the honour to take you for a goose--a wild goose, let us hope.

Winter has come. His visit is due, and since the first snow-flakes a new joy has come to take the place of the little old pleasures that still linger on. For this jolly newcomer, who has the blood and strength of youth, needs all the room there is. Henry’s fingers are so numb that he cannot open his knife, and he buries them in his pockets to feel the pulse of this youthful joy. He puts on his cloak and mittens: it is time for him to start. Walking is hard work; he has to plough his way, and he turns round now and then to look at the furrow he has dug in the melting snow that covers the earth. In this cheerful little soul who walks along with padded steps, the warmth of this pleasure is like a log-fire in a hut in the woods in January; it is as if the evening crickets had left their snatches of song in some nook in the timbers to keep it cheerful till their return. Weary of all this whiteness, his eyes fasten upon a twig of brier glimmering with such an intense green that it seems to be the bearer of all the memories of the shrouded earth. Two men, seen from afar in this frame fishing for pickerel through a hole cut in the ice of the pond, look as if they had come out of some legend.

Henry has walked into the land of metamorphoses. The pine-tree, in its contentment, has deepened to a brown green; with its arms trimmed to support the weight of the snow, it rises like a mass of fantastic architecture. The miracle has spread even as far as the store in Main Street, where the arborescence on the shop-window makes you forget the beautiful Christmas presents that are on show there ... spread to the very panes of your own window, which are being covered with a fern-like growth. Winter is blossoming like the orchards in May with these miraculous trees, each one wrought like a shrine.