Page:Thoreau - As remembered by a young friend.djvu/27

 being sometimes looked uncouth to her, like a long-shore-man,"—she could never quite forgive the sin that his garments sat strangely on him,—when he told his tale to the ring of children it was, as it were, a defence, for he seemed abashed by them. Perhaps as the years came on him he began to feel with the sad Vaughan concerning childhood—

I cannot reach it, and my striving eye1

Dazzles at it, as at Eternity";

and his hope was with him to keep

"that innocence alive,

The white designs that children drive."

And it was this respect for unspoiled nature in the creatures of the wood that was his passport to go into their dwelling-places and report to the children that were like enough to them to care to hear.

This youth, who could pipe and sing himself, made for children pipes of all sorts, of grass, of leaf-stalk of squash