Page:Familiar letters of Henry David Thoreau.djvu/155

 ^ET. 26.] TO HIS MOTHER. 131

the West with them, and will buy nothing here for fear of being cheated ; English operatives, known by their pale faces and stained hands, who will recover their birthright in a little cheap sun and wind ; English travelers on their way to the Astor House, to whom I have done the honors of the city ; whole families of emigrants cooking their dinner upon the pavement, all sunburnt, so that you are in doubt where the foreigner s face of flesh begins ; their tidy clothes laid on, and then tied to their swathed bodies, which move about like a bandaged finger, caps set on the head as if woven of the hair, which is still growing at the roots, each and all busily cooking, stooping from time to time over the pot, and having something to drop in it, that so they may be entitled to take something out, forsooth. They look like respectable but strait ened people, who may turn out to be Counts when they get to Wisconsin, and will have this expe rience to relate to their children.

Seeing so many people from day to day, one comes to have less respect for flesh and bones, and thinks they must be more loosely joined, of less firm fibre, than the few he had known. It must have a very bad influence on children to see so many human beings at once, mere herds of men.

I came across Henry Bigelow a week ago, sit-