Page:Thoreau - As remembered by a young friend.djvu/163

 looking for a job. He had just a ninepence [they were then in use], and he went over to the tavern and spent half of it for rum, and he says it started him right, and in good spirits.” The youth's steady advance from then to the day of his death ought not to make a good Sunday-School book. First, he was hostler, soon promoted to bar-keeper and clerk, then married the only daughter of the innkeeper; was chosen constable. Concord was then a shire-town and as judges, lawyers, jurymen, and witnesses had all made pleasant acquaintance with him in his honest dispensing of spirituous comforts, he was appointed jailor, and was a most able, humane and intelligent one, also tax-collector. Mr. Emerson had performed his marriage ceremony, and, as Alcott and John S. Dwight happened to be with him, they were present as witnesses in the “old Middlesex” parlor. Staples, later, confounded Dwight with the Englishman Wright (of the Fruitlands colony), so, in his old age, telling me the story, added, “I had both of 'em in my jail soon after.” His steady friendship for Thoreau, his first prisoner for conscience' sake, and his distinctly unsympathetic relation with Dr. Alcott whom, with entire kindness, he spoke of as “a regular dude,” have been told.

A few years later he was chosen Representative in the General Court, and twice reelected, serving sensibly and well on the Committees