Page:Thoreau - As remembered by a young friend.djvu/165

 fence for poor Mrs. O'Brien, opposite the New Burying-ground, and Thoreau made it, with George's boyish help. He used to visit Thoreau at Walden and remembers how the house was arranged. He recalls his pausing to hear songs of distant birds, telling what bird it was, and whether male or female, that sung or chirped; also calling attention to insect sounds, and his inferring the insect's state of mind. He recalled the sudden increase of Thoreau's library by his receiving upwards of four hundred volumes of the Week back from the publishers, and Mr. Emerson's saying, “The day will come when this will be famous as Gilbert White's Notes of Selborne,” was more than fulfilled. Mr. Bartlett also told me that, in Pennsylvania, he had met a student, a Russian Jew, who was eager to see him, as a man who had known Thoreau. This man said that, in his early youth, in Russia, he had read one of Thoreau's books, and it had determined him to become a free man and helped him through the toil and danger required. His desire was to translate Thoreau's works into Russian.

Page 66, note 2. Thoreau had earlier objected to a man's deliberately putting himself into an attitude of opposition to the laws of society, or of the land, but rather felt it his duty to “maintain himself, in whatever attitude he find himself through obedience to the laws of his being, which will never be one of