Page:Thoreau - As remembered by a young friend.djvu/154

 Page 23, note 1. This pupil was Dr. Thomas Hosmer of Bedford, for many years a practitioner of dentistry in Boston. He and another Bedford boy, B. W. Lee, later of Newport, Vermont, used to walk to the Academy, four miles, and back, every day and were praised for never having been absent or tardy. In winter they could skate up the river part way. Henry taught the older classes Latin and Greek, also Natural Philosophy. Both of these boys valued the school and their teachers highly.

Mr. Lee wrote to me, “There is one thing which I shall never forget of them, and that is their kindness and good will shown me while at their school, and their great desire to impress upon the minds of their scholars to do right always.”

Dr. Hosmer added this pleasant picture to his story of Henry: “I have seen children catch him by the hand, as he was going home from school, to walk with him and hear more.”

Thoreau's morning talks. Dr. Hosmer said, “showed that he knew himself there to teach broadly, and to awaken thought, — not merely to hear lessons in the rudiments of letters.” Page 23, note 2. Henry thus treated of profanity: “Boys, if you went to talk business with a man, and he persisted in thrusting words having no connection with the subject into all parts of every sentence — Boot-jack, for instance, — would n't you think he was