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 plants and trees. He had extraordinary powers of observation and was a very remarkable naturalist; his understanding of animals was almost uncanny—they seemed to realize how akin he was to them. Hunted foxes would come to him for protection, and wild squirrels would nestle in his coat; he could thrust his hand into a pool and pull out a fish, which seemed to trust him and show no objection! Thoreau was absolutely at home in the open air; he could skate and swim and row and sail. He thought that every boy between the ages of ten and fourteen should shoulder a gun, but that it should only be wild shooting, limitless, and not enclosed like the shooting of English noblemen. Fishermen and hunters, he observed, seemed to get into peculiar touch with nature in the intervals of their sport. But Thoreau himself gave up shooting entirely as he grew older, and studied the habits of birds with a spy-glass; he learnt to remain absolutely motionless, as still as the wall or ground he rested on. From earliest childhood he made collections of Indian relics and of turtles and fishes. He liked to take immense journeys in search of interesting new plants and animals; once he went three hundred and twenty-five miles in a canoe with an Indian. He would camp out and be exposed to all weathers; often he was cold and hungry. A friend describes with a shiver how he slept out with Thoreau on the bare rocks of a mountain without enough blankets; but Thoreau, if he loved a thing, could not do it