Page:Familiar letters of Henry David Thoreau.djvu/448

 422 FRIENDS AND FOLLOWERS. [1860,

making an excursion with you and Brown to another season. Perhaps you will call as you pass the mountain. I send this by the earliest mail.

P. S. That was a very insufficient visit you made here the last time. My mother is better, though far from well ; and if you should chance along here any time after your journey, I trust that we shall all do better.

The mention by Thoreau of John Brown and my &quot; case &quot; recalls to me an incident of those excited days which followed the attack by Brown on slavery in Virginia. The day after Brown s death, but before the execution of his comrades, I received a message from the late Dr. David Thayer of Boston, implying, as I thought, that a son of Brown was at his house, whither I hurried to meet him. Instead, I found young F. J. Merriam of Boston, who had escaped with Owen Brown from Harper s Ferry, and was

was still standing, in ruins, the place called by Channing &quot; Henry s Camp,&quot; and thus described :

We built our fortress where you see Yon group of spruce-trees, sidewise on the line Where the horizon to the eastward bounds, A point selected by sagacious art, Where all at once we viewed the Vermont hills, And the long outline of the mountain-ridge, Ever renewing, changeful every hour.

See The Wanderer (Boston, 1871), p. 61.