Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/155

Rh thirty souls, with their bodies," in his woodland home, one must recognize that he best enjoyed his part as host when he required "the two chairs for friendship" rather than "the three for society." He could stir a hasty-pudding and bake a loaf of bread with one guest, though if twenty came, "there was nothing said about dinner." With an amusing touch of sarcasm on the housekeeping customs of his time, he adds,—"My 'best' room, however, my withdrawing room, always ready for company, on whose carpet the sun rarely fell, was the pine wood behind my house. Thither, in summer days, when distinguished guests came, I took them, and a priceless domestic swept the floor and dusted the furniture and kept the things in order."

Distinguished guests often came; sometimes, finding their host absent, they left a visiting-card of yellow walnut leaf, appropriately inscribed. In addition to the intellectual friends who were frequent callers, Emerson, Alcott, Kipley, Channing, and others, he had many chance visitors of all social grades. There came the Canadian woodchopper and philosopher, "a true Homeric or Paphlagonian man." Hither strolled men and women, boys and girls, fishermen, hunters, poets, farmers, doctors, and "uneasy housewives who