Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/200

174 last break from routine, after the strain and excitement of the John Brown affair, was in August, 1860, when he made his last trip to Monadnoc, encamping there five days with Channing who has described this excursion in "The Wanderer." Their letters record the severe rain-storm through which they journeyed to the summit, sheltered at last under a temporary "substantial house" of spruce roof, hewn by Thoreau. They did not reach this refuge, however, until they were as wet "as if we had stood in a hogshead of water." One cannot refrain from belief that such adventures, however exhilarating to Thoreau's spirits, were scarcely adapted to a physique liable to throat and lung disease.

It has been stated that on this Monadnoc trip he contracted his fatal cold but that is disproved by his own letters and the testimony of Concord friends. The latter declare that he had taken a contract for surveying and was determined to finish the work, though he had to stand in a swamp for hours. He never recovered from that exposure. In a letter to Mr. Ricketson, March 22, 1861, he wrote,—"I took a severe cold about the third of December, which at length resulted in a kind of bronchitis, so that I have been confined to the house ever since." In May of the same year, as he failed to gain strength,