Page:Familiar letters of Henry David Thoreau.djvu/342

 318 FRIENDS AND FOLLOWERS. [1855,

Talk of burning your smoke after the wood has been consumed ! There is a far more impor tant and warming heat, commonly lost, which precedes the burning of the wood. It is the smoke of industry, which is incense. I had been so thoroughly warmed in body and spirit, that when at length my fuel was housed, I came near selling it to the ash-man, as if I had extracted all its heat.

You should have been here to help me get in my boat. The last time I used it, November 27th, paddling up the Assabet, I saw a great round pine log sunk deep in the water, and with labor got it aboard. When I was floating this home so gently, it occurred to me why I had found it. It was to make wheels with to roll my boat into winter quarters upon. So I sawed off two thick rollers from one end, pierced them for wheels, and then of a joist which I had found drifting on the river in the summer I made an axletree, and 011 this I rolled my boat out.

Miss Mary Emerson l is here, the youngest person in Concord, though about eighty, and the most apprehensive of a genuine thought; earnest to know of your inner life ; most stimu-

1 The aunt of R. W. Emerson, then eighty-one years old, an admirer of Thoreau, as her notes to him show. For an account of her see Emerson s Lectures and Biographical Sketches, pp. 371-404.