Page:Familiar letters of Henry David Thoreau.djvu/421

 2ET.41.] TO DANIEL RICKETSON. 395

boys,&quot; etc., near by ; the Middleborough Ponds, with a certain island looming in the distance ; the Quaker meeting-house, and the Brady House, if you like ; the villagers catching smelts with dip-nets in the twilight, at the Head of the Eiver, etc., etc. Let it be a local and villageous book as much as possible. Let some one make a characteristic selection of mottoes from your shanty walls, and sprinkle them in an irregular manner, at all angles, over the fly-leaves and margins, as a man stamps his name in a hurry ; and also canes, pipes, and jackknives, of all your patterns, about the frontispiece. I can think of plenty of devices for tail-pieces. Indeed, I should like to see a hair-pillow, accurately drawn, for one ; a cat, with a bell on, for another ; the old horse, with his age printed in the hollow of his back ; half a cocoanut shell by a spring ; a sheet of blotted paper ; a settle occupied by a settler at full length, etc., etc., etc. Call all the arts to your aid.

Don t wait for the Indian Summer, but bring it with you.

P. S. Let me ask a favor. I am trying to write something about the autumnal tints, and I wish to know how much our trees differ from English and European ones in this respect. Will you observe, or learn for me, what English or European trees, if any, still retain their leaves