Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/203

Rh as consistent,—"I have never quarreled with Him."

The home-life, always happy, was spiritualized during these last weeks. As he was courageous and peaceful, so he inspired the atmosphere about him. Into his nature crept a more tender manifestation of love. His mother told a friend, after Thoreau's death,—"Why, this room did not look like a sick-room. My son wanted flowers and pictures and books all around him; and he was always so cheerful and wished others to be so while about him." He insisted upon joining the family at meals even when his strength was nearly gone, because "it was more social." To them he would relate his strange dreams or unfold his treasures of knowledge and thought, as long as voice allowed. A pathetic little incident proclaimed his tender love for children. As he watched the village boys and girls, whom he had led to berry-pastures, or entertained with stories of his animal-friends, pass his home daily, he expressed to his sister a wish to see and talk with them, adding,—"I love them as well as if they were my own." Such was the stoic!

To the last he was visited by friends, old and young. It is noteworthy that any prejudice harbored by the townspeople against "the Walden hermit" or "the tax-evader" had wholly