Page:The first and last journeys of Thoreau - lately discovered among his unpublished journals and manuscripts.djvu/79

 sixteen pages devoted to the Merrimac and its suggestions, while waiting for the canal lock to fill at Cromwell's Falls, he takes up the tale of his tramp from Shelburne Falls on the Deerfield River, up the valley of that stream, and over the Hoosac Mountain, through which the railroad has since bored its way. This takes up ten pages more; so that, of the seventy-five pages given to "Tuesday" in The Week, twenty-five, at least, are devoted to this journey of 1844 from the Connecticut valley to the Catskills; while seven more are given to the pseudo-Anacreon, and Thoreau's translations of his odes. As an excuse for introducing these digressions, Thoreau says, "Our voyage this Tuesday forenoon furnishes but few incidents of importance." At the end of that day's record he says: "Just before sundown we reached some more falls, in the town of Bedford, where some stone-masons were repairing the locks in a solitary part of the river One young man of our own age left his work and helped us through the locks with a sort of quiet enthusiasm; telling us we were at Coos Falls; and we could distinguish the strokes [31]