Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/158

134 One can readily imagine the religious purity of such environment as that of Walden when "every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with nature herself." With his deeply-rooted religion, pantheistic though it was, and his free solitary thought and action, he records, "My days were not days of the week, bearing the stamp of any heathen deity, nor were they minced into hours and fretted by the ticking of a clock." Such assertion throws light upon an incident related to me by a friend of the Thoreaus, an unpublished anecdote which illumines some of his traits and his frequent misinterpretation. His mother had expressed a wish for a pine-tree of certain size for the yard and Henry, always eager to give pleasure to his family, found the desired tree one morning, pulled it up by the roots, and, balancing it upon his shoulder, started for his Concord home. Arrived at the town-centre, he noticed a number of people coming out of the church and then, for the first time, he remembered it was Sunday. Fifty years ago, in a village community, such disregard of the Sabbath seemed most culpable, both to Trinitarians and Unitarians. When he first realized his position, he might have stopped at any house on the road, "where he was always welcome," said my