Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/154

130 "the bunk," listening, not always with patience, to the extended discussions on philosophy or Scandinavian mythology. As a result, she gained her primal instruction in that branch so that, in later years, she found herself compelled to translate Greek and Roman myths into her earlier models of Thor, Woden, and Igdrasil. Thoreau always welcomed sincere visitors and true neighbors, from whatever distance. While still hewing his timber, he attracted an occasional rambler and adds,—"we chatted pleasantly over the chips which I had made." To him "Visitors" included animal friends, the native mice, the phœbe and the wasps. In the same chapter on his visitors he answers the suggestion of hermit, saying;—"I think that I love society as much as most, and am ready enough to fasten myself like a blood-sucker for a time to any full-blooded man that comes in my way. I naturally am no hermit, but might possibly sit out the sturdiest frequenter of the barroom, if my business called me thither." Doubtless, he inherited some of the Dunbar loquacity, for he once said,—"I love dearly to talk," and friends testified to his wonderful conversational powers among congenial minds. In spite of such general statements and the addendum, given us in "Walden," that at one time he had "twenty-five or