Page:Sir Walter Raleigh by Thoreau, Henry David,.djvu/129

 ,—how then would you know but he was a fool?"

His friend Emerson, however, did not find that the laborer's strokes that he used himself in his "pleached garden" helped him to better strokes of the pen; and so employed Alcott, Channing, and Thoreau now and then to make the laborer's strokes for him, while he meditated in his study or walked the woods and fields. []

11. This trait of cheerfulness was Thoreau's own, and should be named in all mention of him, especially in the long endurance of his last illness. It is well known that the son and namesake of Horace Mann was the companion of Thoreau on that long journey to the unsettled parts of Minnesota in 1861, from which he returned only to linger and die in May, 1862. Mrs. Mann, the mother of young Horace (who himself did not long survive), thus wrote in May of that year to her sister, Mrs. Hawthorne: "I was made very happy to-day by seeing Miss Thoreau, whose brother died such a happy, peaceful death,—leaving them all so fully possessed of his faith in the Immortal Life that they seem almost to have entered it with him. They said [meaning Mrs. Thoreau, her sister, Louisa Dunbar, and his other aunts, as well as Sophia, his sister], they never could be sad in his presence for a moment; he had been the happiest person they had ever known,