Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/54

36 living at Boston at the time of her marriage with a Scotch gentleman of the name of Burns, who came to this country dressed in too furbelow a style to please her Quaker notions, for he had to divest himself of them, (his ruffles over his hands), before gaining her consent to marry him." Henry Thoreau was a worthy descendant of this Quakeress with her rigid hatred of frills and fashions.

John Thoreau, the father of Henry, was born in Boston in 1787. He continued his father's business as merchant in a store in Concord, just southeast of the old court-house. The first merchant had amassed a large property, according to the standards of that time, but his son could not maintain success; perhaps Concord lacked the opportunities of Boston as a trading mart. His business failure was a genuine surrender of property. A friend of the Thoreaus recently told me that, with the honesty which characterized the family, this man, after his reverses, even sold his wedding-ring of gold, that he might yield his slightest effects to his creditors. In 1812 he had married and, at the time of Henry's birth in 1817, the family were living with the maternal grandmother, where John Thoreau was "carrying on the farm." When Henry was eight months old they moved from this farm into the village and the following year his father tested again his