Page:Familiar letters of Henry David Thoreau.djvu/43

Rh was certainly on the Whig side in politics, like most of the educated youths of Concord. His &quot;young chief of the Karlisles&quot; was Albert Nelson, son of a Carlisle physician, who began to practice law in Concord in 1836, and was afterwards chief justice of the Superior Court. He was defeated at the election of 1837, as candidate of the Whigs for representative in the state legislature, by a Democrat. Henry Vose, above named, writing from &quot;Butternuts,&quot; in New York, three hundred miles west of Concord, October 22, 1837, said to Thoreau: &quot;You envy my happy situation, and mourn over your fate, which condemns you to loiter about Concord and grub among clamshells [for Indian relics]. If this were your only source of enjoyment while in Concord,—but I know that it is not. I well remember that 'antique and fish-like' office of Major Nelson (to whom, and to Mr. Dennis, and Bemis, and John Thoreau, I wish to be remembered); and still more vividly do I remember the fairer portion of the community in C.&quot; This indicates a social habit in Henry and John Thoreau, which the Indian &quot;talk&quot; also implies. Tahatawan, whom Henry here impersonated, was the mythical Sachem of Musketaquid (the Algonquin name for Concord River and region), whose fishing and hunting lodge was on the hill Naushawtuck, between the two rivers so much