Page:The first and last journeys of Thoreau - lately discovered among his unpublished journals and manuscripts.djvu/26

 day's record we find a passage about guns (also omitted in printing), which gives a glimpse of Thoreau's boyhood, like the letter of Indian rhetoric to his brother John, in 1837, turning on the delights of hunting:

"There are few tools to be compared with a gun for efficiency and compactness. I do not know of another so complete an arm. It is almost a companion, like a dog. The hunter has an affection for his gun which no laborer has for the tool which he uses,—his axe or spade. I have seen the time when I could carry a gun in my hand all day on a journey, and not feel it to be heavy, though I did not use it once. In the country a boy's love is apt to be divided between a gun and a watch; but the more active and manly choose the gun. Like the first settlers, who rarely went to the field—hardly even to church—without their guns, we, their descendants, have not yet quite outgrown this habit of pioneers; and to-day the villager whose way leads him through a piece of wood, or over a plain where game is sometimes met with, will deliberate whether he shall not take his gun, because, as he says, [xviii]