Page:The first and last journeys of Thoreau - lately discovered among his unpublished journals and manuscripts.djvu/97

 Field, the Irishman, had visited, as Winthrop says. On foot indeed we continued up along its banks, till it became the Pemigewasset that leaped by our side,—and still another, the wild Ammonoosuc that murmured in our ears,—whose puny channel we crossed at a stride, wondering that it should be so rapid to forsake the pleasant land of its birth. But why should we take the reader, who may be gentle and tender, through this rude tract, where the ways are steep, and the inns none of the best for such as are tenderly bred? Rustic men and rough truth would he have to encounter, and many a cool blast near the mountain side.

Here again a break occurs, of a week instead of a day. For now the two brothers were on foot, making their way through Concord and Plymouth, Holderness, Lincoln, Franconia, and Bethlehem, to the Notch of the White Mountains and to the summit of Mount Washington, their highest peak, which Thoreau calls Agiocochook. In this foot-journey they called on Nathaniel P. Rogers, at Plymouth, a friend of the [49]