Page:Sir Walter Raleigh by Thoreau, Henry David,.djvu/38

 liberates me. For once the Sharp rifles and the revolvers were employed in a righteous cause. I do not wish to kill nor to be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which both these things would be by me unavoidable." He listened with much interest to Brown's account of his fights in Kansas, when I had introduced him to Brown in his father's house at Concord, in February, 1857, and noted down many of their particulars; and when the Civil War came on, he was as earnest as any one that it should be fought to its just conclusion, the destruction of slavery. In this he was unlike his English friend Thomas Cholmondeley, who wrote to him from Shrewsbury, April 23, 1861: "These rumors of wars make me wish that we had got done with this brutal stupidity of war altogether; and I believe, Thoreau, that the human race will at last get rid of it, though, perhaps, not in a creditable way; but such powers will be brought to bear that it will become monstrous even to the French. Dundonald declared to the last that he possessed secrets which, from their tremendous character,