Page:Familiar letters of Henry David Thoreau.djvu/424

 398 FRIENDS AND FOLLOWERS. [1858,

Of this visit and his English visitor, Mr. Ricketson wrote in his journal the next day :

&quot;We were all much pleased with Mr. Cholmondeley. He is a tall spare man, thirty- five years of age, of fair and fresh complexion, blue eyes, light brown and fine hair, nose small and Roman, beard light and worn full, with a mustache. A man of fine culture and refinement of manners, educated at Oriel College, Oxford, of an old Cheshire family by his father, a clergy man. He wore a black velvet sack coat, and lighter colored trousers, a sort of genteel traveling suit ; perhaps a cap, but by no means a fashionable castor. He reminded me of our dear friend, George William Curtis.&quot; Few greater compliments could this diarist give than to compare a visitor to Curtis, the lamented.

Mr. Cholmondeley left Concord for the South, going as far as to Virginia, in December and January ; then came back to Concord the 20th of January, 1859, and after a few days returned to Canada, and thence to England by way of Jamaica. He was in London when Theodore Parker reached there from Santa Cruz, in June, and called on him, with offers of service ; but does not seem to have heard of Parker s death till I wrote him in May, 1861. At my parting with him in Concord, he gave me money with which to buy grapes for the invalid father