Chapter V (2)

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.