Page:Thoreau - As remembered by a young friend.djvu/155

 a liberty with you, and trifling with your time, and wasting his own?” He then introduced the “Boot-jack” violently and frequently into a sentence, to illustrate the absurdity of street bad language in a striking way.

Page 24, note 1. Mr. George Keyes, of Concord, spoke of that school as “very pleasant indeed.” He told me that the brothers organized a survey of Fairhaven Hill in Concord and the river-shore below it, to give the boys an idea of the field-work of surveying, and the use of instruments. In this he remembers Henry as the more active of the two.

Mr. Keyes said: “We boys used to visit him on Saturday afternoons at his house by Walden, and he would show us interesting things in the woods near by. I did not see the philosophical side. He was never stern or pedantic, but natural and very agreeable, friendly, — but a person you would never feel inclined to fool with. A face that you would long remember. Though short in stature, and inconspicuous in dress, you would not fail to notice him in the street, as more than ordinary.”

Page 24, note 2. Thoreau sent to his friend a copy of these verses. In Mr. Emerson's journal for August, 1839, is written: “Last night came to me a beautiful poem from Henry Thoreau, ‘Sympathy.’ The purest strain, and the loftiest, I think, that has yet pealed from this unpoetic American forest. I hear his verses