Page:Familiar letters of Henry David Thoreau.djvu/447

 arr. 43.] TO HARRISON BLAKE. 421

brown after his voyage. He is as simple and childlike as ever.

I believe that I have fairly scared the kittens away, at last, by my pretended fierceness, which was. I will consider my thumb and your eyes.

HENRY.

TO HARRISON BLAKE (AT WORCESTER).

CONCORD, August 3, 1860.

MR. BLAKE, I some time ago asked Chan- ning if he would not spend a week with me on Monadnoc ; but he did not answer decidedly. Lately he has talked of an excursion somewhere, but I said that now I must wait till my sister re turned from Plymouth, N. H. She has returned, and accordingly, on receiving your note this morning, I made known its contents to Chaii- ning, in order to see how far I was engaged with him. The result is that he decides to go to Monadnoc to-morrow morning ; 1 so I must defer

1 This is the excursion described by Thoreau in a subse quent letter, lasting six days, and the first that Channing had made which involved &quot;camping out.&quot; It was also Tho- reau s last visit to this favorite mountain ; but Channing con tinued to go there after the death of his friend ; and some of these visits are recorded in his poem, &quot; The Wanderer.&quot; The last one was in September, 1869, when I accompanied him, and we again spent five nights on the plateau where he hacl camped with Thoreau. At that time, one of the &quot; two good spruce houses, half a mile apart,&quot; mentioned by Thoreau,