Henry weighs in his hand a book that has just come from the press. A duodecimo, bearing on its back: H. D. THOREAU--A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMAC RIVERS.

From it rises a faintly insipid odour of glue and ink. But it is no cardboard tomb that he has wished to raise to the memory of the dear companion to whom these pages are dedicated. He is wondering how the delight of a week like that, two adventurous weeks passed with his brother, could possibly be contained between two layers of brown cardboard, and he has half a mind to fling the volume into the corner. It is less true than that arrow-head there on the table.

He is examining his first book, which has at last appeared. It is a mere trifle of pulp or dirty rags, boiled down, flattened into sheets, dried and finally blackened with ink. And beyond that? How about all the things he had meant to put into it? The best part has been lost between the manuscript and the composing-stick. A book that is nothing more than a book may be a very attractive accessory among the drawing-room furnishings of people of taste if the shade of the binding harmonizes with the hangings and the rugs. To a man of the woods whose eye prefers to linger on bare boards and plain whitewashed walls, a book is a useless knick-knack, a rather sorry one, mere dust in a cardboard box.

In this scrap-book of verse and prose (the verse--old verse, for he has ceased to write it--like dried flowers pressed between the leaves) in which the glorious voyage ... yes, ten summers ago now ... serves only as a pretext for personal digressions, he would have liked to put the whole world, with its blowing winds, its floods of light, the fragrance of the river-banks at dawn and all the surprises under heaven that had been gathered in by a twenty-year-old heart. A book of which the first outlines had been sketched under a tent and the chapters had been assembled in a cabin in the woods was not intended merely for the mahogany shelves of Mr. Pettifogger the bibliophile. It should dance and plash like the boat that had borne the two conquerors; it should preserve a little of the flavour of the melons they had carried on board. What was the use of it otherwise? There were enough cemeteries of books already, full of the other kind, with mortuary emblems watching over them.

Did they amount to as much as one dip of an oar in a river spangled with reflexions, these few hundred pages, black on white? (See if you can find any black in nature.) Well, anyway, the book had come out. Not without difficulty. The publishers would have nothing to do with it. In the end he had had to resign himself to a “published by the author.” Another fling of the adventurer, launching his bark for the conquest of the world, with the good Jersey blood of the mariner in his veins. It was for the public now to do its duty by demanding _Weeks_ and _Weeks_ from the booksellers, enough weeks to make up the life of a centenarian, or at least the age of the author. Here’s a book for you, just out, a thousand copies, by Henry Thoreau, out of his own head, every word of it, from the title to the last period. Quite a different affair from an article published in a magazine, between a cream-puff and a sermon.

When you have cherished from college days an ambition to be a writer there is naturally a little warmth in the hand that holds the back of the first book. You have made your bow in the world, you have started, you have set out for the antipodes; you are off on a voyage that will never end. You have openly confessed your secret passion, accepted the ordeal of the daylight that shines on a larger world than Concord. The Sage has encouraged you to try your luck. You are going to see. The author is not greatly troubled in advance about the judgment of the world on the first fruits of a writer of thirty-two. In his silent communion with his notebooks, during the dozen years that he has been preparing himself to write, Henry has fortified himself with assurances that have nothing to do with success or failure.

Curious Journal, curious confidant, a work that is to be continued through many volumes--eight or ten already exist--and that will never be finished till the day when the universe ceases to surprise him, the day when his two eager eyes are closed at last. As the farmer has been in no hurry to sell his crop while he was reaping it, his barn contains the harvest of several years. It has been necessary to add one floor after another in order to get it all stored away. Heaven knows whether all this will keep; but he has taken good care that all the garnered sheaves shall be quite dry.

On his rambles the explorer scribbles on the spot a note or a few cabalistic signs, while he is under the direct impression of the phenomenon or the landscape he is observing. On his return the note is copied out, more deliberately. Later, in its final form, it will be incorporated in the Journal. What Henry, the writer, adds in the evening to the visions and thoughts of the day’s walk in no way destroys their freshness, for they are thoughts of a true Pilgrim, flowers that have unfolded in the rhythm of the walk and that he turns over in his hands at home, in the evening, with his spirit bathed in the open air, so as to study their tints. It might be called, this Journal, the account of a journey that never comes to an end, for the world about Concord is immense and has a genius for metamorphosis; or perhaps the review of a spectacle that is performed for himself alone, with a programme that is constantly renewed, action and setting, with the strange encounters one has after a performance, the people one likes, the people one laughs at. Or the “love story” of a boy who is looking for his own affinities and finds them oftener in the world of plants than in human form. It is illustrated now and then by rude sketches carefully recording some observation or discovery. But whether it is to be called a report, a review, a story or the music of the day, the notebook contains nothing that is not veracious testimony. A descendant of merchants and like them a hoarder of treasures, Henry reckons up in the Journal the gains of the day. He too is in business, and he keeps his accounts with the meticulous exactness of a book-keeper. You can examine his books. Observe the debits and the credits. If the profits do not strike you as very clear, it is because you have singular ideas about wealth, my dear fellow.

The harvest might well have remained in the barn. No purchasers appear, but at times the desire seizes him to sell a few armfuls if only to see whether or not it is keeping well--perhaps, too, for the fun of having a little cash. Now and then Henry wants to buy some fine old book, if only to escape the bother of having to go to the library to read it, or he needs a good pair of boots. Then he draws from his Journal the substance of an article and sends it off to a magazine. Horace Greeley, whose acquaintance he has made in New York, has been of great service in finding a place for his work and has even agreed to advance him a small sum. But Concordians propose and editors dispose. The manuscript is too long, or they will not countenance some of his audacities of thought. Or, what is more likely to happen, the article is printed and the author is swindled. What, dear sir, you are not satisfied with the honour of appearing in print in my celebrated sheet? You expect to be paid for it? You can dig in your own pockets. This misadventure befell him long since with the editor of a certain _Boston Miscellany_ and more recently with that of _Graham’s Magazine_, who published his essay on Carlyle, written at Walden. There you are! You are a Concord hayseed, and these fine gentlemen are giving you a lesson in humility. One doesn’t write for money. Pocket the lesson and clench your fist. And get back to work at your Journal.

And now it has appeared, after all, this volume he has just brought back, freshly bound, from his printer Monroe’s, at whose shop he has been to see it through the press on this twenty-sixth of May. Henry examines his first book, and he does not feel so very proud. He is the author of _A Week on the Concord_. It has been introduced to the public. What next? One must sometimes have confidence in one’s fellowmen and place a figure before a line of zeros.

(Yes, a book is born, and almost at once someone close to you dies, someone whose loss hurts you deeply and blots out all thought of books. Henry loses his sister Helen, the eldest--called back, she too, to the grandfather--Helen who had his features, his eyes, and was so sympathetic with his ideas. Helen has gone, not yet thirty-seven, to keep John company in the cemetery.)

The writer also appears in public when he gives a lecture. It is in the Concord Lyceum that Waldo distributes the honey from his hives. Since he made his first appearance at twenty-one, Henry has spoken there every year. He has been chosen secretary. The honour of addressing one’s fellow-citizens from a chair that has been occupied by a sage of European fame is worth the effort of trying to do it graciously. From the fund on which he can draw to organize his series of winter lectures, Henry can offer in exceptional cases ten dollars to an orator of note; he himself pockets only the thanks of the committee. But the neighbouring Lyceums ask him to come and speak in other towns. Last year his friend Hawthorne, who has left Concord and now lives in Salem, arranged for him to be invited there and asked him to stay at his house. Henry received twenty dollars for his trouble. A fine haul. This year he is taking his eloquence to Worcester, where Harrison Blake lives.

What do you think of the lecturer? Hm, hm.... In the first place, he doesn’t speak, he “reads” a paper elaborately written; he doesn’t drop his manuscript for an instant, and he utters it all in a desperately earnest, monotonous voice. A bad method. He pronounces his r’s harshly. And he is not exactly engaging, this young man. He doesn’t give himself. The people listen attentively to this sober soul who talks to them about things that interest them very little; they are not repelled, they are not indignant, they are simply bored. And the worst of it is that Henry not only believes in what he says but is quite aware of the freezing effect his little discourse has upon people; he plods along with imperturbable gravity. It is as if he had started with some such little preamble as this in his mind: You blockheads down there listening to me, what do I care whether I interest you or not? You seem to think I’ve come here to give you lollypops. Here are a few sour apples and some acorns I’ve collected for you. Do what you like with them. What can a man expect from such frozen wits? It’s quite useless to waste any finesse on these dolts. They wouldn’t see anything in it. They make no personal effort; they don’t come half-way to meet you.... If you go on speaking just the same, it is because you are sustained by the hope of finding one or two living beings among these mummies, a few simple and impressionable souls thanks to whom your pains will not be lost. As a rule, no one comes up after the lecture to tell you how extraordinarily good it is. Well, never mind; you can go home, ladies and gentlemen. There is something to be said for you for having listened without a murmur to such a trying pedant.

No, Henry doesn’t hit it off with the audience at all. You don’t get very far with these good people with paradoxes and ferocious affirmations; you must have the art of flattering and tickling them, putting them into a good humour and touching their hearts. This fellow here doesn’t know the first thing about his business. There is nothing these people like better than to be amused in a sociable kind of way, and he doesn’t even know how to make himself agreeable. He is the worst bore in New England. If you have all that faith, my boy, hand it out in little sandwiches that can be taken with a cup of tea. Add a little water-cress, sprinkle it with a pinch of salt, and serve it with a smile. See what will happen then.

Henry, you are no sort of cook at all. You are only up to boiling gruel in your cabin. It’s pathetic to see a man satisfied with being as poor an orator as he is a man of letters. This refusal to yield to the ways of the world gets to be irritating after a while. No use for him to want to be a writer; he will never enter the paradise of the literary. He would merely bring to it an absurd respect for his art and the firm intention of pleasing himself before pleasing others. Henry, the lover of good work, takes a workman’s pains in perfecting his page. Thanks to the erasures, this manuscript has become an illegible scrawl, not because in the first draught the writing was so uncertain but because the author is so extremely severe with himself. He has a pitiless blue pencil. No “almosts.” Nothing that savours of improvisation. Every word that is not alive, that is merely a word, must disappear. Struggle and toil count for nothing, he must get there. If you could only find me some sort of eraser that would obliterate from this page the exact things that ought to be obliterated: that invention would be even more useful than the best pencil bearing the mark of Thoreau and Son. In everyday life with your neighbours garrulity is irritating enough; in art it is intolerable. The work that comes from Henry’s hands is to the point. You can take it and see how firm the texture is. The man who made it wears corduroy clothes because they are durable and take on an exquisite tone with time. Very well. But let me repeat that with these principles you will never be anybody in the literary world. There copy is knitted by the yard for firms that do a thriving trade.

And isn’t it just as odd to have such a passionate love for plants, animals, minerals, to study with such fervour all these physical phenomena, and yet to have so little in common with the scientists? Science consists of shells, stuffed animals, glass phials, long names, dissertations in musty books, and what interests Henry is the living animal in all its wildness and freedom, the plant with its sap, the phenomenon seized alive in its natural setting. In spite of his tastes and his gift for exact observation, the poet and the lover in him are too exigent to yield precedence to the naturalist. And besides, there is a strange animal that interests him enormously; namely, himself. This is a very poor sort of recommendation among scientists.

On three occasions, however, he sends Concord fish from Walden to Agassiz, who is preparing his great work on the fishes of America. Agassiz is very grateful and promises to pay a visit to his Concord “colleague.” The latter has been appointed a corresponding member of the Society of Natural History in Boston; he has just sent it a goshawk, a rare bird. Even in the village, people have fallen into the way of consulting him as an authority on botanical and ornithological matters. This does not prevent him from being very sarcastic whenever the subject of science and scientists comes up. Just speak to him about the specialists who write a big book on turtles--to amuse a man who knows how turtles live! Or about this or that communication to some learned society.... He says very little about his own zoölogical or botanical observations; he confides them to his Journal alone, for the benefit of those knowing persons who are going to jeer some day at the amateur naturalist and his discoveries. Go ahead and stuff your birds, pedants. Give them your Latin names. See if you can find one that any tree or quadruped pronounces with its branches or its caperings. In this Journal living animals pass, birds call, fishes glide through the water, the loon flings its laughter over the pond, the sap rises in the plants, the trees quiver to the tips of their branches, juicy bay-bushes scent the air: Hebrew for your Latin. These fancies are enough to show that he doesn’t belong to the profession. Leave him to his innocent pastimes.

Besides, this “amateur” places too high a value on ignorance to be taken seriously by the academies. This man who reads Latin and French as well as his mother tongue, Greek fluently, German, Italian, Spanish a little, has a thorough knowledge of old English literature and is more interested than a philologist in the development of the life of a word, as a beautiful plant among plants, runs about the country every day like a schoolboy throwing to the winds the knowledge learned from books. The consciousness that he knows so little delights him so much that he is willing to make his ignorance the very apex of knowledge. Absurd Henry, to be so infatuated with his not-knowing.

Sometimes, as seldom as possible, he goes to the city, for now and then he wants to consult some book that interests him. It is a sad business, reading in a big library. Fresh books, vibrant, vagabond, libertine books, how in the world can you stay so still among those rows of shrivelled corpses? The friend who comes to see you at intervals pities your distress.

When he has finished his reading, the villager invariably goes off to consume a dish of boiled apple pudding at some cheap eating-house (he distrusts their accursed stews), then crosses the town without stopping till he reaches the end of Long Wharf, where his grandfather had his store. There he looks at the sea, the ships, the piles of merchandise. Save for a glance at the market on his way, this is all he sees of Boston. The stir of the metropolis means nothing to him whatever; the fronts of the substantial houses and the faces of men seem to shut him out. Everything here, to the very stones, reeks of respectability. The windows full of idlers and the brawling vulgarity of the streets make him ill. The city is a pickpocket who wants to filch from you the most precious possession you have and leave you on the sidewalk dejected and destitute in a vast solitude. This is because you were not born, because you never played as a boy in one of these crowded neighbourhoods, because you grew up on the bank of a river that wanders through the fields, bathing the whole world with its freshness. For others no doubt, among its stones, the city has wondrous gifts; for a boy who is thinking of old Minot’s cottage on the hillside it is full of shams and shoddy, and what this boy demands is the real. There is a club in Boston made up of some very sympathetic people who meet on the last Saturday of every month; among them are Emerson, Agassiz and Henry James. But although Henry has been invited he never goes there. Quick, take the train and put twenty miles between yourself and this dismal burden of stone house-fronts. Quick, get back to Concord where the village is merely a shabby excrescence amid the verdure. At Concord there are no steamers, no Long Wharves, no crowds in the streets, no immigrants, no big, bustling shops, no special editions; and you feel as if you were at the heart of the world. In Boston there are no humming and singing telegraph-poles where you can listen to the news from afar. Call it parochialism, if you like, but parish towers answer one another. Concordance is no empty word.

At Concord you have a chance to remain simple. Suppose you were to become a great writer or a fashionable lecturer or a light of science and lose the simplicity of heart that alone permits you to have access to the unknown riches that surround you. That would be a fine advancement! There you would be with the esteem of everybody, with your glory or your hard cash, wondering how in the world you could get rid of all these substantial advantages and recover your boyish ingenuousness, and the keen, inquisitive nose, the gift of marvelling at the commonest object that have always so astonished the good William. You would have taken a false step indeed. You would have been transformed into one of those men who are too sober-minded, too dignified or too intelligent to stop and pick a tempting huckleberry beside their path. Your eyes would be dead to the miracle of every day. You would no longer want to be a sailor and skirt the bays and promontories of “some fair wild island in the ocean,” suggested by an oak-leaf. You would lose your elasticity. You would become old before your time, old, respectable and unhappy. You might even pose as a little saint and cease to feel yourself a man complete with his virtues and his vices, no better at bottom than the neighbour he scoffs at and lectures. You would be a success, and you would have lost everything, while at Concord one never becomes a success.

There may have been a moment when Henry wondered if the art of writing could not support the writer; but this moment had passed. He understood the trade and the taste of its customers only too well. Precarious as his other resources might be, they were better than that. As a small boy, running barefoot in the fields and up to all sorts of mischief, and later as an ingenious older boy, he had learned how to dig, plane, paint houses, plant, survey. And now Henry continues to work by the day, as occasion offers. A precious thing, manual labour. It stops babbling tongues and toughens a frail body. It gives a tone to what you write afterwards. Your qualities as a workingman reappear when you come to weigh and balance words. When you have finished a fence of pickets and lattice at $1.50 for every five yards, or built a woodshed by contract for six dollars, it is very pleasant to receive the money; but that is not everything. You must also reckon the pleasure you have had. And add to this the profit you have received in indirect ways, such as the quality of the page on which you relate the impressions of the day. Henry does surveying, and he also helps his father in the workshop. When he is not engaged elsewhere, he gives him his mornings. The family industry is being transformed. The Thoreau pencils are selling fairly well, and a new market has opened for the famous plumbago powder--the secret. It happens to fit exactly the needs of a new invention--electrotyping--and the people give them ten dollars a pound for it. Even though they can sell only a few hundred pounds of it a year, this is not a bad stroke of business for the little family. The pencils have become only a side-issue; they work for the big industry. But Henry makes a trip to New York to dispose of a lot he has made, for he has a large debt to pay.

The poorer you are in Concord, the better you know your true wealth. It is all very clever to create happiness with a thousand costly accessories, but to create happiness out of nothing, to be happiness yourself, is much more interesting, and happiness of this kind has quite a different quality. To have been born poor is a privilege too. In the most authentic great man, no matter how magnificent and complete he is in appearance, never to have worn rags or gone without a meal, never to have been able to toss his dignified respectability to the winds, never to have known what hardship means is a lacuna that can never be filled up. Think of that poor, great Goethe, too well brought up, as he said, to have had any intercourse in his childhood with the boys in the streets.... Whatever you may say, the boy who has never set his bare, smarting feet on the hard ground has missed one of the best of gifts. He has not been judged worthy of experiencing the real savour of this world. Henry has no inclination to make a profession of his poverty, to set himself up in the square for the admiration of connoisseurs. He saves it for himself because it keeps him warm, as a sheepskin coat warms a driver in winter. It has a taste that he likes and it helps him to keep up his good spirits. It lives with him like a comrade in the attic he has arranged for himself in the new house, the yellow one, where his parents have been living on Main Street since August, 1850. He is very much at home there and William lives across the way. At the foot of his garden the boat is moored.

There in his den Henry lives like a king among the spoils of his expeditions, his collections of birds’ eggs, mosses, plants, arrow-heads, his bedside books, his manuscripts--and always a store of nuts to take the place of pipe and bottle. There he sleeps and works and talks with his comrade, enjoying the tawny shade of the latter’s eyes and blessing the fate that has provided for him so generously. Recently his classmates have asked him for an account of himself for the record they are preparing of the class of 1837 at Harvard. Henry’s reply is as follows:

Am not married. I don’t know whether mine is a profession, or a trade, or what not. It is not yet learned, and in every instance has been practised long before being studied. The mercantile part of it was begun by myself alone. It is not one but legion. I will give you some of the monster’s heads. I am a Schoolmaster, a private Tutor, a Surveyor, a Gardener, a Farmer, a Painter (I mean a House Painter), a Carpenter, a Mason, a Day-labourer, a Pencil-maker, a Glass-paper-maker, a Writer, and sometimes a Poetaster. If you will act the part of Iolas, and apply a hot iron to any of these heads, I shall be greatly obliged to you. My present employment is to answer such orders as may be expected from so general an advertisement as the above. That is, if I see fit, which is not always the case, for I have found out a way to live without what is commonly called employment or industry, attractive or otherwise. Indeed, my steadiest employment, if such it can be called, is to keep myself at the top of my condition, and ready for whatever may turn up in heaven or on earth. The last two or three years I lived in Concord woods, alone, something more than a mile from any neighbour, in a house built entirely by myself.

P. S. I beg that the class will not consider me an object of charity, and if any of them are in want of any pecuniary assistance and will make known their case to me, I will engage to give them some advice of more worth than money.

As he sends off this description and thinks of his fellows at college, he sees this poor devil, at the head of a factory, condemned to sweat money out of his machines and his workmen ... this poor devil, launched in politics or absorbed in business, deep in the auriferous mire ... this poor devil reduced to working as some high office-holder ... this poor devil, consenting to spend his life manufacturing counterfeit money stamped with the effigy of Jesus, the enemy of all money ... a whole list of poor devils, with round shoulders or an air of satisfaction, who have not wasted the money their fathers sacrificed to send them to college. He sees them with their positions, their prestige, their prosperous households, their wives, their children, their mothers-in-law and heaven knows what, and himself beside them, the failure, without position, bank-account or influence, with his workman’s clothes, earning a meagre living by the labour of his hands, hands which, like theirs, have thumbed so many books. And how glad and privileged he feels in his attic with his tawny-eyed companion! He would be only too happy to work in their gardens or split the wood for their stoves, offering them his pity in exchange for their dollars. If he met the most fortunate of them all, he would feel like hanging a placard round his neck: “Have pity on a poor rich man”--for some passer-by with a generous heart to slip into his hand a pennyworth of compassion. And if no charitable passer-by appeared, he would gladly give the poor fellow his own mite. You are magnanimous when you are a success.

Is it not from the worst that we often get the very best? Then why not meet ill fortune with a high heart and refuse, on the dullest day, not to be happy over a mere nothing, a trembling leaf, a swaying twig, or the smile of old Minot’s house on the hillside--happy, you don’t know why, because you are happy, happy as a child who plays with his poverty as a comrade, finding in its eyes the colour of your own real wealth?

When you are a rich man like Henry you want to treat yourself, now and then, to some little trip. For one who disposes of his time as he pleases, this is merely a matter of gathering together a few odds and ends. A week or so of surveying, a windfall in the shape of a lecture or a cheque for an article provides you with the means of surveying good fortune for many hours, a week, two weeks, not to mention a store of memories. This is one of the satisfactions of the lot of a man who is free, as all men ought to be free. It is good to work on your manuscripts. But you never write a story to be compared with those that are traced by your feet as you welcome the surprises of the road.

There are always more surprises in Concord than anywhere else; but the world is wide and you want to see how the sun shines in other places. And besides, you want to give your old notions an airing; no matter how wide open you keep your window, they are always in danger of getting a little musty.... There are those hills on the horizon towards the West behind which, at nightfall, from the top of the Cliffs, you see that blazing reflection. The land of the sunset is a powerful magnet.

What if you were to explore one of those hills that rise up, like a challenge and a promise, beyond that stretch of country over there--climb it, brush your boots on its brow, watch the sun rise from up there and see if you can discover the faraway spot in the valley from which you set out? That ought to do your soul good and expand your lungs. There is that solitary Wachusett, for example, forever crouching there in the distance, as if it were watching over some treasure; you would like to go and ask that brother if he finds his solitude bitter or friendly. His younger brother from Concord is coming to make him a visit. That blue wall is not a fabulous vision; it is a solid reality, in harmony with the woods, the fields, the river. It belongs to the family too. Another time the thirty-seven hundred feet of Monadnoc draw him up. He has to prolong his visit, live with the mountain a while, become familiar with the dawn and the sunset on those heights. The visitor camps for one night, two nights, in the open, on the summit of the vision that holds him aloft with all its mass till a small man, on this pedestal, has the illusion of being a somebody.

On the day before, in the morning, well before dawn, he had set out on foot with a companion. They passed through villages and woods, with staves in their hands like pilgrims. The fields were full of fragrance for the early risers, the farms still asleep in the twilight of dawn; save for one reaper already sharpening his scythe, they were the first that morning to tread the July countryside; they passed through the hop-fields, rested on the fence-rails of a farm from which the sound of music reached them; and in the afternoon in the valley they sought shelter from the broiling heat and bathed their feet in the streams they found there. And at last they arrived together on a grassy plateau, strewn with clumps of huckleberry and raspberry bushes, in time to see the moon rising in this tremendous silence--two little souls, serious, lost in wonder, half frightened at finding themselves so high above the rest of their fellow-townsmen. And the dawn, the notes of the birds before the dawn on these heights, the great waves of the slopes below rise out of the shadows as if they were at sea--on what a ship!--as the camp-fire pales and the day breaks and the landscape unrolls in all its unreality: old Massachusetts, the whole of it, bathed in the sunrise, at their feet, spreading its panorama before them in the summer morning! The air of the heights intoxicates them; it has a quality that is unknown to dwellers on the plain. It is not so much that it acts upon your lungs: its rarity has a strange power of exalting the spirit. Henry revels in it and feels at home on the shoulder of the mountain. If he did not live in Concord he would be a mountaineer.

And the charm of the mountains persists. Sometimes he goes still further west, as far as Greylock or Saddle-back Mountain, to pay a visit to Their Majesties. And then--wonder of wonders--the mountains he has always seen towards the sunset rise, in a spirit of contradiction, to the east! Is he a new man who, without realizing it, has taken a trip round the world?... Before beginning his climb he stops in this mountain valley at the next to the last house. It would be fun to spend a week in that house if they would take him in. The mistress is a young woman who continues to arrange her hair while she talks to him in the friendliest way, without any fuss, thank heaven; she is dark and her eyes are full of fire and she questions him with as much familiarity as if they had been children together. She makes him think of his cousin in Bangor. And they really are cousins in a way. She has taken him for one of those daredevil students who often come on trips to the mountain. On the top he finds bits of newspapers they have left about; it is strange to read a stray sheet of some old paper alone on the summit of a mountain by the light of a camp-fire. What wears the best at this altitude is the advertisements and the market prices, for there is a bit of real poetry mixed with them, though the advertisers are quite unaware of it (fortunately); as for the rest, editorials, news, jokes, reviews, heaven save us! And then, after a cold night that he has passed without a blanket, the day dawns over an ocean of fog that covers the three adjoining States as if it were a dream-country rolling off into infinity.... It is the earth that has become unreal, and you are planted there as if you were the centre of this tremendous glory that rises with the sun.... And you descend Tabor again, a little drunk with this vision and no longer in the least cold in spite of the night passed without a blanket.

In the other direction from the land of the sunset lies the sea, quite close--another magnet. The peaks are silent and contemplative, but the sea stirs and rustles like a forest of gigantic pines, lulling its old anguish. On an island in the middle of the ocean you might contrive to have a rich existence if you could ever forget Concord. Or in one of those villages about Cape Ann. The whole Atlantic coast and all the width of the continent lie at the ends of the roads that set out from the village square.

Yes, to go off for two, three, four days, according to the occasion and the plumpness of your purse, to leave Main Street and the church-tower and the sidewalks of the grey little town behind you and attempt an unexplored world ... that’s the thing, Henry ... the real holidays of life. You must have them complete. The first thought of most poor souls on such occasions is to take the train or the stage. They are poor souls indeed. When you are rich you have the means to travel on foot. Henry has no intention of surrendering to a machine or animal the pleasure of treading the road and devouring it for him; this traveller likes the taste of it far too much to leave it to a mere auxiliary. It is a part of the adventure. When a vagabond journeys on foot, the earth invites him to her table and lets him roam all over her domain; those other people are mere stupid tourists who follow where their baggage leads them. Before they set out, the latter are sure to worry about where they will find a lodging; why do they leave home if they begin a journey with the thought of lodgings?

Henry starts off with a pack on his back. It’s a marvel, this knapsack. See if you can find one like it in the shops! The traveller has manufactured it to suit himself. It is waterproof and has compartments; a notebook, the map of the country, his old music-book for pressing flowers, his change of linen are in no danger of being injured. If he is going some distance he carries a little bundle in his hand. It is a package tied up in a handkerchief or a piece of brown paper. He recommends this to you as preferable to any sort of handbag, first because it is lighter and swings more merrily in your fist, and secondly because it causes less trouble. Don’t forget the inevitable accessory of any expedition, a good stout umbrella. A raincoat or an oilskin might be more becoming, but they keep you too warm and they are unwholesome, while under an umbrella you are always exposed to the air and you have only to shut it up when the shower is over. And then you have the rare pleasure of hearing the rain patter on your roof, while you are perfectly sheltered yourself; you are a householder on your own threshold, and you take it easy listening to the rain dripping from the eaves. When you are tired of carrying the umbrella in your hand, you can carry it on your shoulder and even hang your bundle on it, or any other prize you pick up--a bird or a bit of sea-weed. People may laugh at you. Let them. They will never have so much fun in all their lives.

The clever fellow has thought of everything, down to the sewing-case for mending rips and fastening on buttons that fall off. These accursed leather shoestrings are always undone and cause endless bother in walking; they really abuse their right to relaxation. Henry and William have often exchanged their views on this grave subject, a theme worthy of philosophers at least who despise the fiddle-faddle of learning. One day Henry finds the knot-that-will-not-come-undone and triumphs. If everyone applied himself to solving such problems, the world would soon stand on a different basis. But above all, do not forget to take along some old newspapers. You will find them providential. If you don’t already know to how many uses old newspapers can be put, on a journey or at home, try some experiments. You are leaving your shanty for a week or two or for six months and you are afraid that during this time your kettle will rust. Wrap it up in a newspaper and go your way in peace. Or you want to give your copper basin a good scouring; take a wad of newspaper and polish it up as it should be. Your face will smile at you in the mirror you have brightened so easily. And what a comfort a few old newspapers are on your trip, if you have taken them along: they serve as wrappers, as a tablecloth, as a plate, as a means of starting the fire, or as a light, warm chest-protector if it turns cold. And there are still so many fools in the world who believe that newspapers are made to be read, to inform you about accidents and politics. Among the humble truths that might shed a little light on their existence, this is not the least important: in spending your two cents you are making a golden investment if, instead of unfolding the sheet, you place it carefully on a pile of old papers for the approaching day when it will reveal its true use.

The question of provisions also demands a good bit of attention and experience. Henry has weighed this for a long time. He has been armed with certitudes ever since he first took the road. For drinking on a journey nothing equals good strong tea. Because you have seen so many old souls busy over teapots, brewing and stewing, don’t imagine that tea is an old woman’s beverage. A grave mistake. Winter or summer, it is a powerful and subtle tonic. For solid food, carry with you a good loaf of heavy cake. If it is made by your mother it will be A-number-1. You will thank me for this advice. Add a little cornmeal, enough to make some gruel, a small bag of rice, some salt. With a spoon, a tin quart-measure, and, if you like, a saucepan--not to mention the matches and the knife that a walker must always have--you are the master of circumstance. No longer any need to knock at a door, when the fresh air of the road has given you an appetite, except for the pleasure of a chat or to add a glass of milk to your usual fare if you want to bring back your childhood. You are both the inn and the traveller.

These arrangements are very important for the success of the trip. As for your clothes, they should be durable and old, preferably brown or tan--the colour of the earth. They will show the dust and the mud less, and you will not offend the landscape as the figure of a townsman in the country does with his funereal black. In heaven’s name, avoid the “tourist’s” get-up. You must slip through the countryside like an old family friend, not like an intruder. One more recommendation. A straw hat is one of those creations in which the inventive genius of man triumphs. Light and as solid as flexible armour, it places between the burning sun and your poor skull just the right amount of space for you to be able to speak of the _good_ sun.... Suppose a shower, a downpour, surprises you on a day when you have left your umbrella behind. If it does not last too long the wide rim of your head-covering will shelter you. If the straw is a little warped after this bath, well, it has seen plenty of others. It will soon get back its proper shape; your oval, square or pointed skull takes care of that gratis. And this invention, you know, costs only a few cents. If some accident befalls it, if it has not been fastened firmly with your handkerchief knotted under your chin, and a gust of wind blows it into the water or some ditch, well, good-bye, old friend.... I shall regret you because my head breathed its warmest thoughts through you, but I shall find another like you for a mere song at the first shop I reach.

If you travel with this modest outfit, you must not expect to be treated as a rich gentleman travelling for his pleasure. That humiliation will certainly be spared you. Nor must you be too surprised if, along the road, you are taken for a pedlar by the women on the doorsteps or the labourers in the fields. That’s natural enough, and it will even please you, for nothing could be more creditable. They may ask you if you are able to mend an umbrella (why an umbrella in your hand in this radiant sunlight?) or if you are not a tinker. Or a clock-setter. Or one of those casual labourers who work by the day in the hay-making season. You will certainly not be offended by anything of this kind; indeed you will be flattered, for it will show you that they don’t take you for a fool. This is a compliment you don’t often receive from your own fellow-townsmen. At home they are not particularly struck by your ability, but out in the world your ten fingers are in constant request. Even if some theft has been committed in the neighbourhood as you are passing through with a friend and they look at you suspiciously and the constable discreetly walks along with you, you are not indignant at the inquisition. How could the police, with their infallible noses, fail to suspect two mischievous-looking young fellows, roaming about the roads without any apparent purpose, instead of the traveller who puts up at the best hotel and orders his dinner in a lofty voice? You and your companion must be the criminals, or good-bye to the constable and the constable’s nose.

In case you don’t care to sleep out under the stars, ask for a bed in some house along the way. It is so much cosier. You will make the acquaintance of some very good souls. Under their roof, as your wet boots are drying before the fire, you will feel that you are in the very heart of the country. And you will not have to refuse the hotel boy the tip he has failed to deserve, the wretch, because he has polished your famous boots instead of greasing them with a rind of pork.

So, no matter where you go, the world responds to your expectations. It likes to be approached on its own level, and it is for you, the man with the knapsack, that it keeps its finest stories. Finally, you will spend less money than if you stayed at home.

Henry finds the highway tedious, for it is the road of trade and traffic. He has not buckled on his haversack to perform a military march. On the highway the gravel crunches under your feet, the dust gets between your teeth. If his itinerary obliges him to take the road, he at least walks on the bank, stopping from time to time to listen to what the wind has to say on the wires. What’s the latest news? As a rule he follows the paths, taking short-cuts across fields, jumping over hedges, clambering up the little hills without slackening his pace. He has a good wind. Once he has made up his mind to reach a point he has marked on his map, all the obstacles in the world, natural and artificial, can get in his way: he makes straight for his object, scaling every one. Obstacles are made to be leapt over--a much quicker way than going round them. He never loses his sense of direction in the woods. He is a walker who can count more years of experience than Christianity can count centuries. A pagan of a walker.

This time the man with the old umbrella is going off alone. To set out in company would certainly be to multiply by two or three the pleasure of the adventure. But where can he find them, the rare birds that share his tastes? He knows one or two perhaps, scarcely three. Most of his friends are simply not to be thought of as travelling companions. People who wear black clothes and are impeccably correct to the very soles of their feet, people who are charming in their own houses but whom you can’t imagine eating a bowl of gruel before a camp-fire. They would make you conspicuous on the road. You can’t go and ask them to travel like a common tramp, with an old umbrella and a bundle. And besides, you who are an indefatigable walker and as abstemious as a camel would soon leave your companion behind. Half-way along the road you would hear him complaining back there that his boot hurt him or that he was melting with perspiration. He would have to belong to a special type, a Henry number 2 or a brother John.... Or a William. But William does not dare to start out this time; he is afraid of what might befall him with such an intrepid companion when it is no longer a question of a mere afternoon’s ramble to Nine Acre Corner.

Some friends have sent Henry an invitation to lecture over yonder; it is a chance for a little trip. If he sometimes has to be urged a bit, it is only for the stupidest of reasons. When he goes to see some of his friends or appears in public, he has to dress up more or less (a remnant of respect for the conventions, you know).... His old togs, frayed by all the thickets of the wilderness, have such a beautiful patina and they are so well moulded to all his movements and so easy at the arm-holes that it is heart-breaking to be obliged to give them up and harness himself in a frock-coat in which he feels as cramped as a best man dressing up for his cousin’s wedding. The mere thought of it almost spoils his pleasure in advance. He would like to be his everyday self, not this promenader in his Sunday best.

But Henry is ready for any sacrifice. He is going to take the train for Worcester and pay his friend Harrison Blake a visit. The latter is an old Harvard man like himself whom he met through Emerson when he was living at Walden. A little too full of starch, this good man--Henry would like to pinch him now and then to see if he has blood in his veins--but a firm and faithful friend. They write to each other regularly. Henry is a little bored by the correspondence, and he would be very happy if he could make this excellent Blake, who absolutely insists upon regarding him as a sage and a great philosopher, understand how seriously mistaken he is. No, my friend, you are quite wrong; I am a very ordinary soul and very much at a loss how to reply to you, for to me two words exchanged with a carter mean more than all the moral counsels in the world. You insist on asking me for all sorts of spiritual directions, and I am as threadbare in philosophical matters as I am in the matter of clothes. You are throwing your respect away, dear fellow. It is very hard for a pagan, an artist and a savage to make himself intelligible to a churchman, for he is a churchman, this good, faithful Blake. It is a safe bet that in fifty years he would never understand. To appease this keen spiritual hunger, the great “philosopher,” in his letters--after ten years of correspondence they are invariably addressed to “Mr. Blake”--copies out for him whole pages from his Journal, carefully selected from those that are the most “moral.” Their correspondence and their relations always keep this grave tone. Henry feels the frock-coat that cramps him at the arm-holes. But Mr. Blake is certainly the most loyal of friends.

Henry feels more at home with Daniel Ricketson, who invites him to his house at New Bedford, the whaling port. On the first occasion it is mid-winter, and Ricketson, who is a Quaker, is clearing the snow off his front steps and thinking of his visitor who is very late in arriving. Up the carriage road comes someone who looks like a pedlar, in a long overcoat, carrying a little bag and a big umbrella. But it is the expected personage, and he strolls up imperturbably through the friendly snow; he has had no thought of preparing a sensational appearance; they will receive him cheerfully in this disguise as Santa Claus, for it is Christmas Day. The following year Daniel returns the visit. He is a new friend. There are good years for friendship as there are for trees. It even comes to Henry from across the sea in the person of that tall, fair-haired, distinguished-looking young man, the descendant of Anglican bishops, who, on his trip through America, comes to see Emerson who sends him to the Thoreaus’ house, where there is always room for a boarder. Rather an odd fish, this Thomas “Cholmley,” and a little hard to swallow just at first, but charming at bottom under his English patrician’s uniform, fresh from Oriel College. He is just back from New Zealand, where he has had a taste of cattle-raising. They go off on several rambles together about Concord; with William to make up a trio, they set out for the conquest of that old solitary Wachusett. Henry has very little use for these over-civilized young blades who respectfully ask him to take them along on his walks; but he has made an exception of this tall, fair-haired fellow who has been to New Zealand. Some day he must take him to New Bedford.

There, at least, there is no constraint. On the very threshold he shakes off his gloom, the melancholy of the northern pine; he is himself, he is a child. In this congenial atmosphere he is ready for any joke, and he laughs and sings. He doesn’t quite catch the tune, but who cares?--it sounds just as well. The bathing is excellent and they get up a boating-party. One afternoon--is it the venerable Alcott’s presence that excites him?--when Mrs. Ricketson is at the piano, the northern pine, seized with a mad gaiety, actually begins to execute a Zulu dance around the room, taking pains to tread on the toes of Alcott who smilingly watches his good colleague’s extravagant behaviour. If that blessed Blake were only in a corner of the parlour too, on this occasion, ready for a little nip from the dancer’s boots! It would enlighten him better than the longest letter on the nature of Henry’s philosophy. Henry’s face is as long as a night-cap when he is with ceremonious people who bore him. He writes deep, serious things because he is not interested solely in trifles. And there he is, forever pigeon-holed as the most dismal of souls. They haven’t seen him, brimming over with nonsense, acting a pantomime with his own intimate friends; they have never heard him singing at the top of his lungs alone in the woods or surprised him with the children doing some marvellous trick. No, he is and he will remain the morose ascetic who went off into the woods one day, full of hatred for humanity, and pounded out his black thoughts in a rough-hewn mortar. Rubbish!... Let them talk, Henry, while you go on dancing about the room. And look out for your toes, Alcott!

One day, towards the end of July, 1850, Henry sets out hurriedly on a strange journey. He is not going to spend Sunday this time with a friend who is waiting for him; he has to find the body of a friend who has died. Poor Margaret Fuller, whom he had never known well but who recalled to him the days of the _Dial_, was returning from Italy, married now and a mother, on a ship that had gone ashore in a storm on Fire Island. She was one of the victims, after having watched death approaching for twelve hours till a mightier wave delivered her with her child and her husband. Henry has been commissioned by all the Concord friends--Margaret was William’s sister-in-law--to search the scene of the shipwreck and try to recover her pitiful remains and her belongings. He scours the beach, questions everybody, pursues his inquiries. Plunderers of the wreck have been there before him. At first nothing is found but a few papers, some love-letters and the little body of Nino.... Then, eight days after the shipwreck, Henry, who has got his direction from a lighthouse-keeper, finds on a lonely beach the shapeless remains of a body, ravaged by the rough jaws of the sea--a few bones with a little flesh still adhering to them....

Concord enfolds a man very tenderly in the arms of its river and woods when he comes back with roughened skin from such trips as these. But when you are at once a stay-at-home and a nomad, there are few holidays to be compared to a long expedition when your confounded circumstances permit you to think of such a thing. And nothing could be happier than the happiness of the preliminaries when you are making your plans and studying your itinerary, inspecting your knapsack and your boots, and reading the books about the country you are going to explore. Don’t talk about recreation or satisfying some asinine taste for the picturesque by following the footsteps of other travellers. Henry sets out from his village to reconnoitre, to get light on some very important matters and bring back something to fill up his chests there in the garret. These are his campaigns.

There is that crooked beak, shaped like a fishhook, which Massachusetts thrusts out into the sea--perhaps in an attempt to catch that big greedy fish Long Island, if the latter, tired of sniffing the unprofitable metropolis, should decide some day to turn to the North for its food. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to go and see how the wind blows there and have a look at the old sea-dogs that incrust it like shell-fish? Cape Cod. A long tongue of land curving out like a breakwater into the open Atlantic--an immense organ from which the ocean draws its grandest tones.

This year, with his book out at last, Henry can give himself a little extra treat. William has decided to come too. They set out together at the beginning of October (they are obliged to take the train so as not to spend an eternity on the way) and stumble straight into a shipwreck at Cohasset. The train is crowded with Irishmen who are on their way to identify the bodies--from the beach to the church the farm-wagons come and go, some of them carrying the corpses, others the sea-weed thrown up by the storm. Immigrants from Galway in Ireland, and here they are, livid under their white sheets, arriving, feet first, in the land of their hopes. The flag of the shipwrecked vessel is drying there on the rocks with pebbles on its four corners, still keeping its colours--not dead like the Irish lads. The captain and the other survivors will lead the funeral procession.... At the base of the fishhook they leave the train and take the stage as far as Orleans, where the tongue of land grows so thin: it is nothing but a sandbar sixty-five miles long by a few miles in width. How good-natured the people in the stage are! Simple and natural as if--O joy!--no blessed social categories existed in their astonishing country and they were all old acquaintances. Does the nearness of the ocean teach people the art of living?

It rains and blows the next day, when they start out on foot. Never mind, they are not going to wait for it to clear. They walk along the shore; the umbrella shields them and the wind drives them on. They are not loaded down like those two little Italians who are walking towards Provincetown with their organs on their backs. It is an entirely new landscape for the lads from Concord. No trees. Here and there a cottage with a red roof. Octagonal windmills, such as they have never seen except in pictures. In the fields heaps of clam-shells; the pigs, they say, are fattened on the clams, those marine acorns. And see there, those stunted apple-trees sheltered in a hollow, those little old toy-like trees from which a child could pick the apples by hand. It would be difficult to creep your way under them, the branches are so low and shrubby. The little Cape Cod horses are as amusing as goats. You great Concord farmers, if you could measure the scantness of the land the people cultivate here--about as much as a miser could hold in his palm! But it yields a little rather meagre corn and the vegetables in the tiny gardens actually seem to be thriving. This is the country of the sea.

The best thing is to leave the road and march along to this roar that you hear uninterruptedly on the right. The companions have come here not to follow a road but to enjoy the ocean. They cut across the fields in the direction of the three Nauset Lights. Then, in the wind and rain, they are lost in an absolutely bare plain, shut in by fog. The smallest object appears immense in this desert and as if suspended between sky and sand. It is just the way one should see this interminable plain. Henry feels so happy that he could sing. He is going to try to keep clear of the villages up to the very end of the Cape so as not to break the powerful charm. At the end of this vast plain, and after crossing a stretch of upland covered with shrub-oak and beech-grass and a strip of bare sand, they suddenly find themselves at the top of a Bluff: at their feet lies everything they have come to seek--the beach and the Atlantic. The ocean is dark under a stormy sky--as Atlantic as possible. Those white lines of foam, some distance out, reveal the sandbars. And beyond that nothing ... nothing but Europe, and faraway Jersey ... so people say. It is too beautiful here for you to have any desire to go over and see it. From this point on the two umbrellas set out to skirt the shore, as close to the water as possible where the sand is hardest.

Twenty-five good miles lie before them to the tip. As they sail along under the umbrellas that shelter and aid them, with the wind at their backs, the walk side by side becomes glorious. Two happy souls under their whalebone turtle-shells travel along so close to the water’s edge that every now and then they have to leap quickly aside to escape a great wave that has watched them from afar and flung itself upon them: perhaps it is the umbrellas that have provoked it into lashing them with its kelp-weed tails. And when you have played with the waves it is a delight to scramble up the sandbank that forms the back-bone of the Cape, so as to have a wider view of the ocean and look off into the distance and over to the left, to the desert of sand. The rolling country yonder, covered with autumn-tinted shrubbery, permits them at intervals a glimpse of the bay. Walking now on the ridge, straddling the Cape, now on the fine sand--there are no rocks to break the wonderful monotony of this shore--the wayfarers take their time, resting now and then; for the sand, soft as it is to their feet, makes walking difficult after a while. Not a sail in sight, for the sea is too heavy; not a soul on the beach. It is as if the ocean preferred to see no one about him when he is roused. Days might pass without your encountering two natives of the country, those plunderers of wrecks with faces hard as a stone, a stone that the sea has rolled from the beginning of time and is ready to go on rolling for as many ages as it chooses.

But they do not ask for any distraction. The enormous spectacle fills the scene. It is better even not to talk amid this continual roar that obliges them to shout; and if they do it is only to thunder some Homeric lines to put themselves in tune with this bass voice. Surprises strew their path, marvellous plants, dragged up from the sunken palaces of the sea, all of which they would like to carry away if they could only keep them alive in their flexibility and their lustre. Henry chews a tip of one of them. The beautiful sea-medusas that strew the beach in their tattered finery are as if struck with consternation not to be swinging any longer, delicate and transparent, in the hollow of the waves: dispossessed princesses whose hearts shrivel on this alien strand. In spite of the noise of the sea they hear the piping of a plover. Suppose they have a little lunch? It is noon, time to settle themselves in a hollow of the bank and eat something, as two good boys should who have gone a long way since breakfast in the inn at Orleans and are famished by the salt air. Some dry sticks, a fire, a superb clam cooked over the sand as the principal dish; the meat is a bit rubbery, but with a cracker and sprinkled with the cries of the sea-gulls it is quite edible and even savoury. And look there, the weather is clearing....

By evening the pilgrims have reached Wellfleet. They must think of shelter for the night. In that little house over there, with the gable pierced with those small irregular windows, there will surely be a corner for two fellows who are not hard to please. No one at home. How about the other? An old woman who has had her eye on these two suspicious-looking individuals fastens her fence-gate, then resolutely goes back into the house. Hm.... We’ll see. Knock, knock. An old man opens the door and asks them with a distrustful air where they have come from and what they want. They explain. Of course we might be almanac-vendors, but no, my friend, we’re not. We’re from the famous Concord where the great battle took place at the time of the Revolution. The old man is eighty-eight, so he was fourteen when that historic event occurred. These pedlars who are not pedlars are too much for him. Well, walk in, since you’ve come from the country of the Revolution. The old woman relieves the strangers of their bundles and their hats, while the grandfather grumbles: “I am all broken down this year. I am under petticoat government here.”

The hospitable family is composed of a daughter who looks as old as her mother, and a brutish-looking, heavy-jawed son who goes out abruptly at the sight of these strangers; there is also a boy of ten. “These women,” the old man says to Henry, “are both of them poor good-for-nothing critturs. This one is my wife. I married her sixty-five years ago. She is eighty-four years old, and as deaf as an adder, and the other is not much better.” The good soul is an old oysterman who, since sailing the seas in his young days, has had much intercourse with oysters and the Bible. He likes to gossip and they converse in a friendly way about oysters, surveying and apple-raising. The half-witted son returns and begins to mutter, without lifting his head: “Damn book-pedlars--all the time talking about books. Better do something. Damn ’em. I’ll shoot ’em”.... Whereupon, the old man, assuming an air of authority as if he were used to it, says: “John, go sit down, mind your business. Precious little you’ll do--your bark is worse than your bite.” But the sullen imbecile persists in muttering, goes and sits down at the table, eats up everything that is on it and reaches out for the apples which his mother is paring for her guests’ meal. She draws them away and sends him about his business. There are many of these imbeciles in the villages of Massachusetts.

But it is a pleasure to listen to the old oysterman who relates his recollections in a language as salty as the water that you swallow with an oyster. He well remembers seeing Washington, a man with such a fine bearing! And to show how well the great general sat his horse the old fellow strikes an attitude, straightens his shoulders and bows ceremoniously to right and left, sweeping the absent three-cornered hat with a wide gesture. It is just as you see him in the school-books, but in what picture will the general ever have such a grand air as he has in this little house on Cape Cod, evoked by the mimicry of an old oysterman? After this they all go to bed. The boy, who is in the chimney-corner, takes off his shoes and stockings, and as he has a sore leg they rub it with salve before he goes upstairs. The imbecile takes off his old shoes and follows. Then the old man, removing his shoes in turn, without ceasing to discourse on the miseries of the world, exhibits with pride a pair of calves as plump as a baby’s.

William and Henry retire to their room. Someone behind them draws the bolt and fastens them in. You can’t be too careful. After all, you never know with these clever people who are up to all sorts of tricks.... (Ah, good people, how right you were to distrust two strangers who had dropped from the clouds. Two days later the Provincetown Bank was robbed and the police were looking for two men who must have done the job. Good heavens, to think you might have had those two scoundrels under your roof.... Nothing more prophetic than the instinct of an imbecile who wants to execute them out of hand. Put this in your pipe and smoke it, you sham pedlars, even if you are not the thieves. You have been taken for tinkers or almanac-vendors already--it may be pickpockets next. If you had never left your own hole-in-the-ground, how would you have ever known that you had in you the makings of all these characters?)

The door is unlocked before dawn and Henry runs to the beach to watch the sun come out of the sea. They have breakfast. The old man begins to spin his yarns again, forgetting to eat, and says to his wife, who reminds him of this: “Don’t hurry me; I have lived too long to be hurried”.... Meanwhile, the two comrades breakfast a little gingerly, not being sure of the exact spots on the hearth sprinkled by the old man’s tobacco-juice while the meal was being prepared there. They pay their score and set out. The weather is marvellously clear this morning, swept clean by the wind that howled in the chimney.

They follow the dunes. The tide is coming in. The vessels are skimming like gulls over the ocean; one, a barque, furls her sails and drops anchor a gunshot from the shore. In this miraculous brightness of the ocean how large and strange objects on the sand appear: at a distance a bit of wreckage looks like a cliff. The most absurd little rocking-horse here would have the size of some monstrous steed. And always, under your feet, those gifts of the sea that would go so well in your collection: a wet pebble, gleaming like a jewel, debris, come heaven knows whence, rolled by the waves heaven knows how long, roughly modelled by the ocean, polished or tarnished, a beautiful crab’s shell, a sponge, a five-franc piece, bearing the image of Louis XV the Well-beloved. Henry’s eyes, with their Concord habits, even find an arrow-head, placed there in his honour. They must bathe in that little basin formed by a sandbar, then sit down to dry and watch the coots dancing like corks on the waves or the schools of menhaden, with their back fins projecting two or three inches out of the water. In some patches the sea is as purple as a grape. That sail yonder comes from some port of dreams for which you are homesick even without knowing what it is. It speaks mysteriously to a man, naked in the sun after his bath, who hears the pores of his skin murmuring together how marvellous it is to belong to a body that is freed from its braces and buttons.

It will be best not to stop at Truro but to push on to the Highland Light where they will find comfortable quarters. Indeed the keeper receives them without asking them who they are, receives them, in his simple brick dwelling attached to the white lighthouse, with the generosity of a lonely soul. They climb with him up the winding iron stairway to the lantern when he goes up to light his fifteen oil lamps. (What a job keeping them in order! There are the wicks, the oil that congeals in winter, the reflectors, the windows, and on warm summer nights the moths that glue themselves there by the million, dimming the lights--and yet everything is neat and in apple-pie order in the lantern.) Think what a fine place it would be for a lad with studious tastes who was too poor to feed his own lamp! And what a beautiful inn! There you are, all night, close to the waves, snug in your bed, a part of the lighthouse, yourself a light towards which the lookout-men at sea direct their eyes. Wonderful!

The Cape narrows and is soon nothing but a shrunken tongue of land along which move two insects in holiday spirits. They are approaching the point of the hook. Three or four days along the seashore, tramping in the October wind, and there is Provincetown at last, a mere dot. A compactly built little town, a barking cur, people going about their business--all these things cut a sorry figure before an ocean that swings from one continent to another. The two hundred schooners of the mackerel fleet that lie there in the harbour are like toys scattered on a green carpet. There is a smell of drying fish along the plank sidewalks of the little town, which is engulfed in the fine sand that filters into everything, into your shoes, into the houses. To bid farewell to the Cape they push on across the deserted region to the North of the port. The wind from the open sea stings and caresses them and makes their skin smart. The whole burden of the Atlantic comes to die at their feet in the whiteness of the foam and a rumbling as of the end of the world.

It is Sunday. Some sailors are engaged in painting their boat at Provincetown when a tithing-man comes along and tells them they are disturbing the Sabbath. That’s all very well for you, my friend. On Sunday you lounge about the house after church, smoking your pipe with your family, looking at the picture-papers or getting drunk if you like; it’s easy for you to observe the Sabbath without causing any scandal. But from where I sit, peacefully watching the harbour and the sea, I can hear the shouts of a preacher from the meeting-house over there with its windows wide open to the sunlight. (Wouldn’t you think he was a drill-sergeant or a boatswain giving his commands?) Now, tithing-man, why not tell that fellow to stop making a nuisance of himself? Those sailors are not disturbing a soul as they paint their boat, but that fanatic poisons the beautiful Sunday air for everybody.

Monday, the departure. They set off for home by sea, saluted, as they leave the harbour, by some red-shirted men who, from their boats, watch the little steamer passing: a Newfoundland dog, with his paws on the rail of one of the boats, watches them too, watches as a big sailor’s dog knows how to watch. In no time at all the Cape and everything over there behind them is a mere pale beak almost level with the sea, and before they know it they are tying up at Long Wharf between two big boats ... Boston ... the train for Concord. Oh, to get to Concord quickly enough to bring home before they are gone that scent of codfish and oysters and that drone of the sea in the shell at your ear....

It is so beautiful, this desolate coast, so powerfully appealing, this Atlantic solitude, that Henry returns alone to the Cape the following summer and twice later, alone or with William. Cape Cod has become the first colonial possession of an affluent lover of the wilds. But the danger of these long expeditions is that one becomes insatiable. A rich man always wants more. Having gone to the extremities of Massachusetts, to the mountains and the sea, he has taken it into his head to press on to the boundary of the United States, and beyond....

Henry, you are ready to throw your money out of the window. William has agreed to go up to Canada with you, or is he the tempter who has induced you to go? However that may be, the matter is settled between the two accomplices. They are going to take advantage of a special excursion train. It is very disagreeable to travel under such conditions, packed in with those idiotic tourists, but it enables them to go a long way for very little money, and once they are there they can get rid of the other reduced-price gentry soon enough and set out by themselves on a tour of discovery. They will have a week before them.

They leave Concord in the morning, before eight o’clock, and by six in the evening they are on the shore of Lake Champlain, which crosses the frontier ... on the map. For it crosses nothing on the landscape. But is there a single one of these fifteen hundred excursionists who, at this solemn moment of passing from one country into another, is not looking for some mountain-chain, some gulf, some gigantic gate--heaven knows what--to show that here one nation begins and another ends? A frontier, and the face of the earth goes straight on as if it knew nothing about its own political geography? But they begin to hear people speaking in a different language (is that the looked-for gulf?), and already they feel far away from home--on the “foreign soil” of the romances.

More than anything else, Montreal is the church of Notre Dame. A deep cave like that in the heart of a city deserves a visit. It is very still there. The church can hold ten thousand worshippers, but at the moment it seems to contain only three women who are praying, and the latter do not even lift their eyes to look at two fellows who are softly making the tour of the nave with their hats in their hands. A troop of natives come in, countrymen on a visit to town whose first thought is to kneel before the high altar, with the rather awkward movements--as Henry thinks--of cattle preparing to lie down. The glitter of the altars, the candles and the images do not impress him, but he is touched by this ingenuous respect. The silence is good in this cavern. There reigns here a little of the mystery of the deep woods; it is open every day to all comers, a retreat to which you can come and meditate, away from the crowds, and really feel at peace with yourself. If you were condemned for your sins to live in a town like this, you would certainly come to Notre Dame, with the same respect as these good women, to pray in your own fashion between services. If it were not for the priests and their mummery, this Catholic religion would not be a bad thing at all. It has such beautiful shrines for meditation. Even the holy water in the basins would not disturb you very much if, in the minds of the faithful, it were sacred like the water of a fountain dedicated to a goddess. This Roman religion merely needs to be brushed up a little by a pagan. Notre Dame is certainly an astonishing cave.

In the streets, priests and Sisters of Charity. These latter must have been weeping all their lives long to have such scalded-looking eyes; they have the faces of people who have been buried and dug up. They all go about with lowered eyeballs, as if they had made up their minds never to smile again. The sight of them insults the daylight. There are also a great many soldiers about, mounting guard or drilling. Henry wonders of what use all these puppets are. They are probably to amuse the citizens, like a Punch and Judy show. And there are market-women in the square with beautiful apples, pears and peaches for sale. (It is the end of September.) Henry buys some, hazarding a few words of the language of the country. These honest fruit-sellers at least are flesh-and-blood women, and their apples are apples and not church ornaments. And the old French names that he reads in the town have as much flavour as the apples, or as the chronicles of the navigators who set sail from Saint-Malo in their immense old tubs and landed at Tadousac, at the confluence of the Saguenay. Henry has read those chronicles, and they enchant him.

The zigzag fissures there in the rock are Quebec and its climbing streets. And the citadel--and the barracks and the barracks. High up there on the ramparts he perceives from afar a terrible warrior with an immense cocked hat; he wonders if it is the god of war stuck up there like a scarecrow, or if that horrifying puppet with its gun is preparing to destroy the world. These soldiers are the ornament of Quebec; they are set about everywhere to make it clear that the English are energetic people. In the citadel the Highlanders are drilling. They have the graceful, elastic step of mountaineers: strong, healthy young men, condemned to a humiliating and ridiculous occupation that is stupefying them and turning them into automatons in the service of Her Britannic Majesty. Their movements make a sad impression upon a man who stands there, with his old umbrella and his bundle, staring at the soldiers, as if they were a new species whose habits are unknown to him. He is poorly dressed, as his way is when he travels, with a thin, twenty-five-cent palm-leaf hat on his head and a brown linen sack to conceal the raggedness of his coat. The spectator compares himself mentally with that superb officer there who, without his disguise, would probably look just like anybody else. He would almost like to hand him his own duster out of charity, so that he wouldn’t have to look so much like an old bogie.

But he had better climb down again to the town and have a look at the milkmen’s dogs, harnessed to the little carts containing a single immense can, and the market by the water-side, and the old women sitting in the open air behind their vegetables and fruit--and the ferry-boats continually going to and fro with their motley, chattering crowds. The cabmen talking in French to their old hacks remind him of the ancient France that still keeps its aroma here. In this restaurant he has just entered what interests Henry is not the bottles and the glasses on the table but a great map of Canada hanging on the wall. This table is made of mahogany, and it would be a pity to scratch it. The guest spreads out his handkerchief, then climbs up on the table and begins to study the map. When he sets foot on the floor again, without having broken any of the dishes, he has had his meal; the food itself will be merely dessert.

But it is to see the country that he has come to this “foreign soil.” The two friends set out on foot to explore the Falls of Montmorenci. They promise themselves a good deal of pleasure. There may be less uniforms and nuns along the roads. It will be a great experience to see simple human beings.

The peasant women are working in the fields, buxom, healthy-looking creatures with ruddy cheeks under their broad-brimmed hats, and much more agreeable to look at than the natives of the stronger sex. The villages straggle along with their whitewashed houses. Thank goodness, you no longer feel yourselves strangers as you did at Montreal and Quebec. Isn’t it odd? No matter where you wander on the planet, as long as there is a tree of any species, a blade of grass, a glint of running water or a beach where pebbles have been washed up, you are immediately at home; while a score of miles from your own church-tower you have only to set foot on the sidewalk of a town to feel yourself an alien, with all communications cut with the world and your own kindred. A strange business, this “foreign soil.”

Evening falls. They have reached the village of Beauport. It would be much cosier if they could put up with some of the inhabitants. They are in the heart of the Canuck country, where you have to speak the language. Even the little curs bark in a kind of French. Henry courageously knocks at a door, and when they shout “Entrez” from within some fine little phrases emerge, the fruit of his reading since school-days. His accent may not be very good, but often enough the people understand it. The only trouble is that he can make scarcely anything of their voluble replies. And the blunders are very amusing. These honest Canucks are full of good will, but unfortunately they are poor people and have no bed to offer the strangers. So our friends are compelled to enquire in their best pigeon-French: “_Y a-t-il une maison publique ici?_” Who would ever guess that these two boys are looking for a simple inn? The Canucks of Beauport have no inn, as they have no _maison publique_. But there may be room at the mill or the grocery. At this other house, where the travellers sit down for a moment to drink a glass of water, the people politely excuse themselves by showing them the loft where the whole family sleep, the only bedroom in the house. At last, under a less poverty-stricken roof, they are offered the best room and a bed with coarse, unbleached linen sheets. But there is no coarseness in the hospitality of the Binets, who do not lock them into their room like that funny old oysterman who had seen Washington; they even ask their guests if they would like some brandy with their breakfast. No, good lady, a plain apple will taste better to us than any drink.

The next day they set out for the Falls. The spot from which they can see them best has been appropriated by a mill-owner, who has his mansion and grounds there. Very sorry, dear sir, but we are going to cross your land with as little fuss as if we were in Concord. It appears that you supplanted on this spot a mighty lord of the last generation. But mighty lord or not, there is a great natural spectacle here, and the view belongs to the humblest of walkers who comes from a distance with his bundle to see the Falls. What do we care for your land-title? Sir William and Sir Henry here have a right to enjoy the sight to their hearts’ content.

There should still be time to go and see the Falls of Sainte-Anne, a simple matter of thirty miles on foot. On the road they constantly pass wooden crosses and little shrines to the Blessed Virgin with ex-votos. Now and then they meet some villager wearing a cap of red, blue or grey worsted who bids them a polite good-day and lifts his hand to his bonnet. How civil and human they are! Even this fat, friar-like personage in his black, priestly robe--what can these fellows do for a living?--who appears at the door of his parsonage, where they have knocked to ask their way, gives them a friendly greeting. There is no inn at Sainte-Anne any more than at Beauport, but here too there are good souls to put them up. The master of the house, in his red cap, has the true Norman stamp; he talks with his stubby pipe between his teeth, which makes his Canuck French very hard to understand. Just the same, two fellows who have come from New England feel very near home here, very near and very far away at once, much further away in time and space than the excursion-ticket had given them any reason to expect. They are in the heart of old Normandy--Henry has returned for one night to sleep in the cradle of his race. He may not be thinking of this perhaps, but it is very much to his taste here. The villages, the streams have such charming names: Rivière de la Blondelle, Rivière de la Friponne, Rivière de la Rose, Rivière du Sault a la Puce, Pointe aux Trembles ... How can he help feeling that he belongs to the race of poets-without-knowing-it who thought of such names as these? All the little houses turn their backs on the road, perhaps the better to preserve the fragrance of the old country.

After the visit to the Falls and a good stiff walk along the Saint Lawrence, they stop again at nightfall at a farm where they pass a very agreeable evening chattering French in the great kitchen. It is Sunday. William’s pipe pays a tribute of incense to the little Canuck gods who have never died on the cross. What they cannot make intelligible because of their accent they write. This little girl knows how to write. Henry amuses them all by drawing a map of the country in chalk on the old oiled table-cloth. They are the best of friends in no time. With the few words at their disposal they talk about the soil, for that subject can be expressed in very simple terms. The good people talk about “senelles,” and Henry at first supposes that they mean snails till they show him the little red apples of the hawthorn. They also go out for some real apples to give the two strangers, beautiful, firm, glossy apples that have just been picked. In the autumn fragrance of ripe apples, Mother Earth says thanks in a universal language.

These poor Canucks, who are so gentle, with their rather humble politeness and an intelligence that seems to have been arrested in its development, are pitiful creatures in the eyes of you Yankee tourists, and you make fun of them because you are so clever and so strong. But what would you have been if it had been perpetually rammed down your throat by your father and your father’s father that the one great thing in this world is to obey our holy mother the Church? You would have been dunces, and you would have been mean, hard-hearted dunces. You would not have had the openheartedness, the simple courage, the good nature and humanity of these people. (Henry is thinking of the clear, laughing “By gosh” of the wood-chopper from Quebec who had come to see him in his cabin.) A little of the wealth of these “poor souls” would not come amiss in your pockets, shrewd fellows that you are.

But they must rejoin their fellow-excursionists. Quebec. Yes, the soldiers in red, the priests in black, the nuns, the seminarists.... You have seen enough of them. To Montreal on the boat, and then the train that is to carry you home. In the car the inevitable wag of the party begins to imitate the cry of the cabmen in the streets of Quebec. Among these prosperous Yankees a silent man is thinking of the landscape along that tremendous river, so many miles wide, with its falls, its islands, and the little children who said good-day so politely to the strangers on the road. Reckoning all the expenses, the journey to Canada has amounted to $12. A little more, to be sure, than the net profits of a year of farming at Walden. But he does not regret his money.

Henry has cousins at Bangor, in Maine, the stepsons of his Aunt Elizabeth, one of whom is in the lumber-trade. He has never gone back there since that time in his twenty-first year when he had wanted so much to find a place as a schoolmaster almost anywhere. While he was living at Walden, he was seized with a desire to go up and shake hands with his cousin and do a little exploring with him in the forests up there. Henry lived in the woods, and the woods are cousins of the forest. One special attraction was that mountain which was more than five thousand feet high and in the midst of the wilderness and still almost unknown, Ktaadn. A royal mouthful, with that dense primitive forest he would have to penetrate before reaching the giant and offering it the homage of a very small cousin who had come a very long way with his knapsack to dine with His Mightiness.

On the last day of August, in the second year of his stay in the woods, he left his cabin (no need to bolt the door) and set off with his outfit in his haversack. From Bangor, Henry and his relative, the lumber-merchant, reached by buggy the meeting-point of the two branches of the Penobscot, where two companions were to join them. On an island in the river, where some degenerate Indians were living on their lands, they engaged two of the latter who were to serve as guides. One of them pathetically called himself Louis Neptune. The real journey began here.

Humanity, in this region, already presented the rough, honest features of a wood-cutter in a red flannel shirt. A solitary store stood for trade; it was filled with all kinds of “sweet cakes” upon which the lumberers threw themselves like starving men after their long fast in the woods. They also sold cartridges and toys for the children who were anything but visible. Perhaps these too were to amuse the wood-cutters. The road stopped here; they marched forward in Indian file. The forest had engulfed them; from an elevation they saw, as far as the eye could reach, nothing but its sombre green bosom. Pines, beeches, birches fraternized and struggled over the moss. There was no animal so scarce as man, and what a surprise it was to encounter him in the form of Uncle George, as he was called, living here on his lands so far from everyone, with another man and two women and his beasts, like a pasha! They were to spend the night under his roof, for it was here that the two Indian guides were to join them.

Excellent Uncle George, offering his hospitality with such an open hand to four travellers, and refusing to take any recompense! It was easy enough to see that his ancestors belonged to the good Scotch race. And what hospitality! Henry saw them preparing a royal dinner over an enormous fire with logs as long as an axle-tree: on the table were ham and eggs, wheat cakes, cheese, salmon, shad, sweet cakes and stewed cranberries, all in profusion. And butter in such quantities that they gave it to you to grease your boots with. Henry felt very much alive in this land of Cockaigne. Henry the sober rejoiced in this munificence, for it was all seasoned after his own heart and everything was so simple, so grand and so beautiful in this forest setting. He dreamed at Uncle George’s of that “larger and more populous house, standing in a golden age,” where his blessed fellow-townsmen, those dear little provincial souls whom he knew all too well, had died of their stinginess, and the large spirit, the magnificent generosity reigned that he had found here in the remote depths of the woods.

Louis Neptune and the other Indian did not arrive, and Uncle George consented to serve as their guide. They would lose nothing by this. With a neighbouring settler whom they persuaded to join the party, there were six of them in a boat that played in the cleverest fashion with the current, the rapids, the whirlpools and rocks on a level with the water. George and his neighbour Tom were quick and sure-eyed boatmen. Henry was enraptured with the sport, which was all new to him. This was the logging country, where the great felled trunks adventurously jostled their way down the watery road and came to a stop in piles, waiting for the flood to dislodge them. It was a country of lakes too, big and little and strewn with islands. They were now on North Twin Lake; it was evening, and in the moonlight they rowed by turns, singing, pausing now and then to listen to the voices of the solitude. Henry no longer knew where he was nor what adventures lay before them through these interlacing waters and islands....

At the loggers’ camp where the expedition halted in the afternoon, they had had some tea and sweet cakes; this was the last human vestige in the direction they were going. And now as evening had come they made camp, cooked their supper, and then, stretching out with their feet to the fire, gossiped a little before going to sleep while they studied the starry sky. By daylight, through the clouds that encircled it, they had already caught a glimpse of the giant’s brow. This was a trout country too, and the fish fell upon the bait ravenously, shimmering like flowers as you heaved them out of the water and flung them on the bank. Henry, the veteran fisherman, had a dream about them. He dreamed that he was fishing the whole night long in a miraculous shower of these flower-fishes. The vision was so acute that he was compelled to get up early in the morning and go and see whether it was true or whether he had only dreamed it. He went to the bank, cast his line and in the moonlight caught as many as ever he could want: trout and roach leaped and fluttered just as they had in his dream. They were like flying-fish.

The party was obliged now to leave the boat and turn towards the mountain on foot. Uncle George had never been further than this spot. So now it was Henry, rover of the woods, who took the head of the column. Following his old custom he took the compass and steered straight through the dense forest for the foot of the mountain, without seeing it. By noon they had breasted their way over so many firs and birches that their stomachs were groaning, and they broiled some trout on sharpened sticks, each with his own fish and stick. Gathered about the fire, they were like six sorcerers fishing in the flames. That night they camped within sight of the summit. But the guide was too impatient to wait for the next day; he scrambled up alone, on all fours, hanging by branches, slipping and recovering himself, till at last he reached a rocky plateau where he could reach with his finger the skirt of a cloud. And the next morning, while his companions were still struggling in a chaos of rocks, there he was on the summit, on the last ridge, pressed on all sides by the clouds.

He had hardly expected to find the Giant in such a savage humour. The little man who had come to pay him a visit felt rather overwhelmed; the spirit in him was silent, intimidated. He had hoped for some sort of rugged smile. But no, the Giant sounded as if he were muttering between his granite teeth: “What the devil are you doing here, you little worm? Go back to your mother.” The Giant had no invitations for a little man who had made such a long journey and run the risk of breaking his neck to see him. He was a crabbed, secretive Giant who didn’t like people to meddle in his affairs. Had this rather cold welcome somewhat disheartened Henry? The country through which he passed on his return, after having tumbled down the mountain by the bed of a torrent, drenching himself to his heart’s content, was stamped with an almost menacing severity that chilled him at times. The desolation of these dense, infinite forests, without a suggestion of a path, without the faintest sign of anything akin to this biped who was groping his way and had to scramble up to the top of a fir-tree to get his bearings was so enormous that he felt excluded, baffled, effaced--so utterly that he wondered, as he touched his own body, if it was not itself matter without a soul.... Had he had to come all this way then to find the limits of his own wilderness? Was such a region as this, absolutely devoid of any relation to humanity, outside his domain? Would the gods of his own wilderness at home refuse to haunt the forests of Upper Maine? In that case Walden would find its master here. Was that so? Strange, anyway--very strange.

He did not become himself again till he heard the laughter of running water and found the boat once more. That was human at least. The Giant no longer weighed on him, nor the mighty roof of the forest. They descended the stream; the rapids were terrible. You should have seen the two men with their spike-poles, catching hold again of the empty boat after letting it drop over a fall, leaping into it and allowing themselves to be whirled down the rapids, cool and collected, familiar with all the tricks of this crafty water. When they reached the neighbourhood of Tom’s house, whom should they see but Louis Neptune and his companion, each in his own canoe! In their old clothes, broad-brimmed hats, broad capes, they looked like veritable blackguards. And their explanations were like their looks. It was not their fault that they had missed the rendezvous; they had been the victims of a wild jollification and had not yet recovered from the effects, poor devils. It was all right. And they were welcome to their muskrats too.

A glass of beer at Tom’s, a farewell to Uncle George, whose dogs were mad with joy at the sight of their master and fairly devoured him; then off for Bangor, Boston and Concord.

Henry was coming back to see his cousin again. This mass of virgin forest, with its watery veins, dappled with lakes as the lakes were dappled with islands, attracted him as a kind of challenge; and this ursine wilderness disturbed a little the thought of his own. Seven years later, the pair were off again, in an open wagon, on the road from Bangor to Moosehead Lake. This time the Indian they had engaged as guide and paddler met them as he had promised. No drunken Louis Neptunes this time. Joe was a good-looking lad of twenty-four, short and stout, with small feet, a broad face, eyes narrow and slanting towards the temples, wearing the red flannel shirt of the lumberman. Although he knew all the American slang, he was a full-blooded Indian.

This time they were not going to disturb a Giant in his stony meditation. They were setting out by water for Lake Chesuncook, another solitary majesty but a less lofty one. After crossing Moosehead Lake on a little steamboat, they carried their canoe and provisions over to the Penobscot. It was a joy to Henry to watch Joe tarring the little boat, which was nineteen and a half feet long and painted green. They sat in the bottom on birch-bark mats, and there were two big paddles which they used by turns; they sat with their legs stretched out or tailor-wise and sometimes knelt. Whenever a bird appeared, Joe said its name in the Indian language--a strange melody, as if the bird were naming itself. You couldn’t help thinking how happy the creatures would have been at the Creation if that great poet, the Redskin god, had been there in his paradise to name them.

This was the country of the moose, as big as a bull or even a powerful horse, with two palm-leaves on his head for horns and delicate hoofs that divide very far up and are flexible when he bends over. It was a long time since Henry had done any hunting, but his curiosity was too lively for him not to accompany the two others when they pursued the moose, whose tracks they saw on all sides.

Joe, in the silence in which they glided along in the moonlight, imitated the call of the animal by blowing into a birch-bark hunting-horn. No reply this evening: nothing but an occasional dry rushing sound as of the closing of some faraway door in the forest, a falling tree. But later, as they were ascending a little tributary stream, a great head appeared which, when they took good aim, dropped into the water. It was not Henry’s shot, needless to say. The animal was as big as a good-sized mare; the long fall from the high shoulders to the receding rump gave it almost the look of a giraffe. Henry watched Joe, skilfully removing the skin, making a fearful butchery of what the moment before had been a clothed and perfect form. Henry was no milksop, but he did not like to see life destroyed. It was true that this evening he did not refuse to eat a moose steak, which tasted rather like pickled veal. It was also true that three comrades eating together fried moose-meat cut directly from the animal and cooked over live coals in the open wind, in a magnificent solitude, while they sat with their backs against the towering fir-trees to the sound of the rippling water that rocked their canoe, was a very different thing from seeing a similar scene pictured in the almanac or in the tales of missionaries. You felt as if you were living a mighty life. And as for savagery, you didn’t have to aspire to it any longer; you were eating it, you were partaking of it.

In the moonlight, the fairies had taken possession of the prospect, erected their scenery, arranged their lighting effects, and Henry half thought he was some personage of the forest of Arden in the brain of Shakespeare and not just a little fellow from Concord crouching in a canoe with Joe the Indian and his cousin the lumber-merchant. Henry was sleepy and he fell into a dreamy state: he was floating through prodigious gardens and avenues bordered with fantastic architecture where he heard the sound of Joe’s horn calling the moose: _ugh, ugh, ou-ou-ou ... ou-ou-ou_.... The venison had gone to Henry’s head. The others were hoping for the chance of a second shot. But for him the hunting was finished. One moose was enough. That great despoiled carcass had impressed him too painfully, and he had not digested the moose-steak very well. He had not made the journey with any such intentions as these. And there were enough of these red-shirted woodsmen coming in the pay of employers or a company to massacre trees and animals; the forest should know the face of at least one disinterested friend.

Henry left the others to their pleasure and sat down by the camp-fire to examine the fruits of his own hunt--the botanical specimens he had collected that afternoon. Then he took out his notebook and jotted down his impressions, just as if he had been in his own bedroom at Concord. But his room was vast this evening, and what an evening it was here for a solitary man with that stream of moonlight on the river ... with those great shafts surrounding him with their sombre profiles ... friendly shafts destined for the axe, destined for the saw, for the crime of being great and brawny and for holding under their skins the promise of such beautiful timber. The common destiny of trees and men, to be doomed to trade, to be sold in planks or pencils, instead of being understood, loved and glorified. In the dancing light of the flames the little men and the tall trees looked as if they were bending over the shoulder of a boy who was writing instead of joining in the chase.

At Chesuncook, that great log-house belonged to Ansell Smith, who had cleared a good stretch along the lake. It was enough to see the assembled logs of which it was made, lapping over one another several feet at the corners, enough to see that forester’s broad-axe leaning by the door to love the fine, manly air of the place and be happy at the prospect of spending the night there in a beautiful room where the wooden partition creaked with every movement. On the way back to Bangor, they stopped at an island that had been left as a reservation for the Indians. The Governor was a rare old boy whom they found sitting on the edge of his bed, in his shanty, dressed in a frock-coat and well-worn black pantaloons, with a red silk handkerchief about his neck and a straw hat. He was deaf, but he had hardly a grey hair in spite of his eighty-nine years. His corpulent squaws were gathered about him. They were tamed, Christianized, slatternly Indians. They were interested in politics, and were not in agreement on the question of the school which the priest, the sole holder of the Roman candles, wanted to close. Henry stopped for some time by an Indian who was making canoes. He would have liked to spend a whole season there, as an apprentice, and master this fine, primitive art. But he was obliged to take the trail for Concord again.

How was he going to like it after having gorged himself with this wild nature? Very much indeed, you may be sure. It had variety and all sorts of fine shades, and he never wearied of his old domain as he would have wearied after a while of the deep, monotonous forest. These solitudes of Upper Maine were like a strong wine that he liked to have a taste of now and then as a tonic. But they would never have done for every day. Those dear old attaching surroundings at home were ... how was he to put it?... “nature humanized.” Exactly. You would never have believed it perhaps: hu-man-i-zed. A fellow does not come back from Upper Maine, you see, without a curious little memory to accompany the indigestibleness of the moose.

Four years later the taste of this strong wine tempted Henry again. He had made another visit to Cape Cod early in the season and had scarcely been home a month when he started for Bangor. This time it was not his cousin who was going to make the journey with him but his friend Edward Hoar, the beloved companion of many a ramble about Concord--including the one when the two “damned rascals” set fire to the woods. Rambles of long ago, for Edward had been living for eight years in California. They meant to reach the Allegash Lakes and return by the East Branch of the Penobscot. In this way they would encircle Ktaadn, giving it a sufficiently wide berth not to disturb the Giant.

They could not do this without a guide. The Bangor cousin recommended one whom he had known from boyhood. He was another Joe--Joseph Polis; a very different sort of fellow from the Joe of four years back. This Joe was a grown-up man, forty-eight years old, who had spent his childhood exploring the solitudes around the sources of the St. John. He now lived with his wife in a pretty house surrounded by a vegetable garden, just like a New England villager who subscribed to the county paper. A stoutly built chap, of rather more than middle height, with a broad face--the true Indian type. He spoke a passable English, using l’s for r’s. He belonged to the aristocracy of his tribe. Joe was glad to join the expedition and agreed to the price. He was to carry his own canoe--literally, for he bore it on his head to the stage, where he installed himself beside the driver. As an old hand, he brought with him, along with the great knife that dangled in a sheath from his belt, nothing but his axe, his gun, a blanket and a good supply of tobacco. Joe had bought a new pipe. He was very economical with his words; when you spoke to him, he muttered some vague phrase, as if all such things interested him very little. At the tavern, when a tipsy man asked him if he smoked, adding, in reply to a kind of yes: “Won’t you lend me your pipe a little while?”, Joe looked straight over his head and answered with an absent air: “Me got no pipe.” Joe’s silence would be the greatest relief after the palaver and smartness of white people.

As there were three of them in the bark canoe, with their baggage, there was no room for them to stretch their legs, but even so it was better than it was in the stage. And in the evening how much better than the inn was the little tent, set up in a dense wood where it was as black as an oven. They were in no need of a lullaby to put them to sleep as they rolled up in their blankets; but Joe, at Henry’s request, sang in Indian a slow, rather nasal chant on some well-known themes, obligingly furnished by the missionaries, about the only and sole Almighty, ruler of the world. But there was such a fine simplicity about it that you utterly forgot the flatness of the performance: it was like a child singing his childish thoughts. Henry, who slipped outside the tent some time after midnight, saw a bit of phosphorescent wood. With his knife he shaved off a few chips which, when he placed them in the hollow of his hand, lighted up the lines of the palm. It was the first time he had seen this. He was so entranced by his discovery that he had to go and wake up Edward and show him his magic night-lamp.

In the morning, the piercing _ah, te-te-te, te-te-te, te-te-te_ of the white-throated sparrow ringing through the wood sounded the Sunday reveille. Joe wanted to stop for the day. Joe was a good Protestant and he had principles; at home he never failed to go to church. Of course if they were absolutely determined to go ahead, he would have to go with them, but the money he earned would be the wages of sin.... Well, perhaps this could be arranged ... later.

Joe was exquisitely ingenuous. He was full of admiration for pious people. He said his prayers on his knees, in a loud voice, in his own language, morning and evening. If, by inadvertence, he happened to lie down at night without having said them and remembered it, he immediately scrambled out of his blanket and said them in double-quick time. You could see that he had been to a good school. This evening, to atone for having worked on Sunday, he said a particularly long prayer. But how much more natural a Joe he revealed when, glued to the bank on his stomach, he began to talk to the muskrats in their own language, calling them with a strange squeaking sound with his lips.... Or better still, when he named in his own tongue some incident of the forest life. The Indian word for echo was _Pockadunkquaywayle_: kindly place the accent where it belongs and see if you can find anything like it in your own language. Henry was quick to note every scrap of this music; it enchanted him. The words of his own tongue had been worn away like pennies that have been passed from hand to hand for centuries. Joe’s words were like butterflies--he wanted to catch them without hurting them at a moment when they were motionless on a leaf, with their wings open and still beating. How he would have liked to write a dictionary of all these earthy words, which had the quality of the pressed leaves he brought home in his old music-case or those veiny pebbles on the beaches of Cape Cod.

Two white men and an Indian plunged into the immense forest of fantastically shaped larches, where the mosquitoes poisoned them and made an infernal buzzing din about the fire when they stopped. Sometimes, in the depths of the night, a man rolled up, still awake, in his blanket on his arbor-vitae mattress heard in the dense silence the long-drawn call of the loon, rather like the hallooing of a man on a very high key. They reached Lake Apmoojenegamook, the goal of the excursion, and then Heron Lake, where a procession of sheldrakes passed them.

But no creature could have been odder than this odd fish Joe. As sharp as a weasel, by turns lively and taciturn, sparing of words and gestures, he was always master of himself except when he had made a good shot, when he trembled with emotion like a novice. If you asked him the same question twice, his silence gave you to understand that you had asked him once too often, and if you suggested that he might explain one of the numerous tricks he knew, he would oblige you to swallow this reply: “There are some things a man does not even tell his old woman.” And then sometimes, along the trail, or when he was paddling, or, more often, in the evening, after he had said his prayers, when you were not asking him anything he would suddenly begin to tell you some interminable yarn. You should have heard him describe his interview with the famous Daniel Webster whom he had gone to see in Boston. After an endless wait, he was received like a dog by the great man, so rudely that Joe said to himself: “You’d better take care. If you try that I shall know what to do.” A humbug, that Webster, a talking-machine. No Indian would ever have received a visitor so bluntly.

Joe had preserved the old Indian custom of leaving a trace of his passing by making an inscription on a tree or hanging up a bit of birch-bark. Once all of a sudden he said to Henry: “Me make a bet. We two follow the path. I take canoe and you take the rest. See which gets there first.” And he at once pulled off his boots and stockings, tossed the boots to Henry and set out ahead. To make up a bundle of all the utensils, the moose-skin, axe, paddle, gun, frying-pan and the rest, would have taken time for a little white man who merely gathered up everything he could, dashed off in pursuit, overtook the Indian, passed him.... But he was forced to stop, for the innumerable utensils slipped out of his arms, and Joe overtook him in turn. The obstinate little white man, however, hugging all his traps desperately to his sides, outran the Indian again and saw him no more. When the man-canoe came up with him, both were out of breath. Joe explained that he had cut his feet on the rocks and concluded with a laugh: “Oh, me love to play sometimes.”

One night Henry had a bad scare. In a desolate region where a great stretch of the forest had been destroyed by fire, he suddenly noticed that Edward was missing. It was inexplicable. Among the standing or fallen corpses of the trees, he vainly searched for him in the twilight. Near a waterfall that made the earth tremble, Henry camped with Joe, but he could not sleep. From time to time he thought he heard the voice of his friend calling him through the roar of the water. What could have happened to him? He was nearsighted, and he might have fallen over some precipice. On the morning after this terrible night, Edward was found again, smoking his pipe to soothe the cry of his hollow stomach which had been empty since the day before. He thought they were ahead of him when they were behind. After this they could have eaten two moose-steaks each for breakfast.

The great journey was ended. They were back again among men, or almost. That evening, the new-mown hay on which they were sleeping in an open barn was like a foretaste of the feather beds that awaited them; the hay was full of grasshoppers, but the smell was delicious. Now, from time to time, they met an Indian in a canoe on the river, and Joe would exchange a word with him in his own language. Before reaching the end of the voyage, Joe, who had taught Henry the proper way to paddle, asked: “How you like ’em your pilot?” There was his house at last. The two friends stopped there for an hour to rest after the rough journey. They caught a glimpse of Mrs. Polis, who was wearing a hat and a silver brooch; but the Indian did not introduce his fellow-travellers to his “old woman.”

That very evening, two veterans climbed into the train for Bangor, with their battered belongings, back again from the lakes of Finland perhaps or, who knows, from a journey across some _terra incognita_ of the map.

What a beautiful trip! Joseph Polis.... He was just a poor devil of a denatured Indian who said his prayers like a theological student--a fallen sovereign who hired himself out as a guide to strangers. Just the same, it was Joe who had made of this fortnight the richest of the three expeditions to Upper Maine. Henry was full of him. He could talk of nothing else but their guide, mentioned him in his letters to friends, thought of him every time he ate something that Joe had taught him to like. Joe had entered his life for good and all. Poor Joe was going to find himself placed, without knowing it, on a level with heroic and immortal figures; he had earned on this expedition a great deal more than his dollar and a half a day.

Joe had spoken for his whole race, which had always appealed so strongly to Henry’s heart. Every time he had found himself in the presence of an Indian--degenerate, catechised, mere shadow as he might be--the blood had spoken in him; not the old Norman blood, nor the Scottish, nor the English, nor the Welsh, but this subtler blood that is mixed, in everybody, with the red blood. There was no romantic passion in this cult; it was like an avowal of a secret kinship. Yes, it was of Joe especially that he would think if he was able to carry out some day the work he dreamed of composing so lovingly on the North American Indian. Joe’s coat-of-arms should be a bear paddling a canoe. There were far less proud artists than these to whom America could turn for the designs of its armorial bearings.

So many dreams of childhood, affinities, old desires, found their embodiment in Joe.... The artist’s love of the finest shades of instinct, admired in a descendant of the race that scattered music as it scattered words along the way. The taste for the primeval so ingrained in a man to whom, in spite of college and the classics and his environment, a valueless arrow-head spoke more intimately than a verse of the Bible. The ambition also of a writer to secrete the flint-flakes under his phrases, so that other vagabonds, finding them there some day, might make a collection of them and keep them in their dens. All this found something in Joe.