Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/288

274 walk at times without freezing his ears, if they were exposed, but infant blood circulates faster. The clothes with countless patches which claimed descent from pantaloons of mine set as if his mother had fitted them to a tea-kettle first. This little specimen of humanity, this tender gobbet of the fates cast into a cold world with a torn lichen leaf wrapped about him; is man so cheap that he cannot be clothed but with a mat or rag? that we should bestow on him our cold victuals? Let the mature rich wear the rags and insufficient clothing, let the infant poor wear the purple and fine linen. I shudder when I think of the fate of innocency. A charity which dispenses the crumbs which fall from its overloaded tables, which are left after its feasts, whose waste and whose example produced that poverty!

3 Went round by Tuttle's road and so out on to the Walden road. These warmer days the wood-chopper finds that the wood cuts easier than when it had the frost in its sapwood, though it does not split so readily. Thus every change in the weather has its influence on him, and is appreciated by him in a peculiar way. The wood-cutter and his practices and experiences are more to be attended to. His accidents, perhaps more than any others, should mark the epochs in the winter day. Now that