Page:Familiar letters of Henry David Thoreau.djvu/484

 458 FRIENDS AND FOLLOWERS. [1861,

your town, here the other day, or week, looking at farms for sale, and rumor says that he is in clined to buy a particular one. Channing says that he received his book, but has not got any of yours.

It is easy to talk, but hard to write.

From the worst of all correspondents,

HENRY D. THOREAU.

No later letter than this was written by Tho- reau s own hand ; for he was occupied all the winter of 1861-62, when he could write, in pre paring his manuscripts for the press. Nothing appeared before his death, but in June, 1862, Mr. Fields, then editing the &quot; Atlantic,&quot; printed &quot; Walking,&quot; the first of three essays which came out in that magazine the same year. No thing of Thoreau s had been accepted for the &quot;Atlantic&quot; since 1858, when he withdrew the rest of &quot; Chesuncook,&quot; then coming out in its pages, because the editor (Mr. Lowell) had made alterations in the manuscript. In April, just before his death, the &quot;Atlantic &quot; printed a short and characteristic sketch of Thoreau by Bronson Alcott, and in August, Emerson s funeral ora tion, given in the parish church of Concord. During the last six months of his illness, his sis ter and his friends wrote letters for him, as will be seen by the two that follow.