Page:Familiar letters of Henry David Thoreau.djvu/193

 MT. 30.] TO R. W. EMERSON. 169

telling you if I didn t know anything would do for the English market, and some men, Deacon Brown at the head, have signed a long pledge, swearing that they will &quot; treat all man kind as brothers henceforth.&quot; I think I shall wait and see how they treat me first. I think that Nature meant kindly when she made our brothers few. However, my voice is still for peace. So good-by, and a truce to all joking, my dear friend, from

H. D. T.

Upon this letter some annotations are to be made. &quot; Eddy &quot; was Emerson s youngest child, Edward Waldo, then three years old and up ward, of late years his father s biographer. Hugh, the gardener, of whom more anoil, bar gained for the house of Thoreau on Emerson s land at Walden, and for a field to go with it ; but the bargain came to naught, and the cabin was removed three or four miles to the north west, where it became a granary for Farmer Clark and his squirrels, near the entrance to the park known as Estabrook s. Edmund Hosmer was the farming friend and neighbor with whom, at one time, G. W. Curtis and his brother took lodgings, and at another time the Alcott family. The book in question was &quot; A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.&quot;