Page:The first and last journeys of Thoreau - lately discovered among his unpublished journals and manuscripts.djvu/29

 themselves with umbrellas (since called parasols) were unable to unfurl them, they frightened the horses so; and they were a dead loss on their hands. So that they 'wanted to get some young man of confidence' to go round among the horses with them a spell, to get them used to it."

This is plainly a Dunbar story, slightly embroidered by the dramatic talent of Mrs. Thoreau, whose mother, the grandmother of the tale, and widow of Rev. Asa Dunbar, afterwards married Captain Minott, of Concord. The Rev. Asa Dunbar's children had the "Lust zu fabuliren" which Goethe ascribes to his mother, and could "set out" an adventure to its full value. Oddly at variance with this rustic jest is the next omitted passage which follows the mention of the "mediterranean sea," on page 314 of The Week, and precedes what is said of Staten Island, where indeed these observations of the ocean-strand were first made in 1843.

"The most inland shore is seashore. What is the world but seashore everywhere? Aye, all men live upon this line in their daily experience, humming this vast rhyme,— [xxi]