Page:Thoreau - As remembered by a young friend.djvu/174

 speaking of Indian arrow-heads, he asked Thoreau if they were not rather hard to find. He said, “Yes, rather hard, but at six cents apiece I could make a comfortable living out of them.”

Mr. Reynolds added: “Thoreau was one of the pleasantest gentlemen, most social and agreeable, I ever met. When I officiated at his father's funeral he came over the next evening as a courteous acknowledgment, and spent two hours, and told his Canada story far better than in his book.”

From his window Thoreau could see the quiet river. Mr. Emerson, coming home from a visit to him during the last weeks of his life, wrote, —

“Henry praised to me the manners of an old, established, calm, well-behaved river, as distinguished from those of a new river. A new river is a torrent, an old one slow and steadily supplied. What happens in any part of an old river relates to what befals in every other part of it. 'Tis full of compensations, resources and reserved funds.”

Page 118, note 1. The news of Thoreau's death came to Louisa Alcott, then nursing in a military hospital. In the watches of the night, sitting by the cot of a dying soldier, her thoughts wandered back to the happy evenings when Thoreau might bring his flute with him to please the growing girls, when he visited the