Page:Thoreau - As remembered by a young friend.djvu/107

 in a lonely wood, waiting for his friends, the wild creatures, and winning in the match with them of leisure and patience. When at length the forest began to show its little heads, the utterance of a low, continuous humming sound, like those of Nature, spoke to their instincts and drew them to him. Like the wood-gods of all peoples, he guarded trees and flowers and springs, showed a brusque hospitality to mortals wandering in the wood, so they violated not its sanctities; and in him was the immortal quality of youth and cheerfulness.

Thoreau had the humour which often goes with humanity. It crops out slyly in all his writings, but sometimes is taken for dead earnest because the reader did not know the man.

He would say with a certain gravity, “It does no harm whatever to mowing to walk through it: but as it does harm to