Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/53

Rh the Thoreaus; the elder children, John and Jane, bore the names of father and mother respectively. Another inheritance from the Jersey family was the rich, sonorous voice transmitted to Henry Thoreau and his sisters; the former always retained a slight French accent and a bearing of alert, tense energy, "as if he had not a moment to lose." The removal of the earlier Thoreau family from Boston may be traced to the father's second marriage, in 1797, to Rebecca Kettell of Concord. It is certain that at the beginning of the new century, John Thoreau was living in Concord where he died in 1801, at the age of forty-seven. Thus early had the family curse of consumption appeared, destined to shorten the lives of two generations of Thoreaus. There is a tradition that this first John contracted his fatal cold while patrolling Boston streets in a severe rain-storm, when a Catholic riot was imminent in 1801. The last of his children, Miss Maria Thoreau, died in Maine in 1881, and with her the family name vanished from this part of America. She was the family genealogist. In a letter, now first utilized in print, written from Bangor, March 10, 1873, she recounts an interesting item regarding her mother's ancestors and their Quaker traits: "My grandmother's name was Sarah Orreck, American by birth I presume, and