[FOOTNOTES:]
[1] Emerson's Sketch of Dr. Ripley. Hood, in his Music for the Million, describes an angry man as slamming a door "with a wooden damn."
[2] At the date of this letter Dr. Ripley was not quite eighty-two, and he lived to be more than ninety. Mr. Alcott, who has now passed the age of eighty-two, has been for years doing in some degree what Dr. Channing urged the patriarch of his denomination to do, but which the old minister never found time and strength for. It is curious that these two venerable men, whose united life in Concord covers a period of more than a century, both came from Connecticut.
[3] This princely anecdote is paralleled, in its way, by one told of Gershom Bradford, of Duxbury, son of Colonel Gam. Bradford, the friend of Washington and Kosciusko, but himself a plain Old Colony farmer. Once walking in his woods, he saw a man cutting down a fine tree; he concealed himself that the man might not see him, and went home. When asked why he did not stop the trespasser, he replied, "Could not the poor man have a tree?" Gershom Bradford was a descendant of Governor Bradford, the Pilgrim, and uncle of Mrs. Sarah Ripley, of Concord.
[4] This would, of course, diminish his own share, as the law then stood, from one half the estate to one fourth, or less.
[5] "These facts," says his biographer, whom I knew well, "show clearly, I think, not only that his love of right was stronger than his love of money, but that he would rather make any sacrifice of property than leave a doubt in his own mind whether justice had been done to others."
[6] Lucy Barnes, daughter of Jonathan and Rachel Barnes of Marlborough, was born July 7, 1742, married Joseph Hosmer, of Concord, December 24, 1761, and died in Concord, ——, ——. Her brother was Rev. Jonathan Barnes, born in 1749, graduated at Harvard College, in 1770, and settled as a minister in Hillsborough, N. H., where he died in 1805.
[7] The resemblance between some of John Woolman's utterances and those of Henry Thoreau has been noticed by Whittier, who says of the New Jersey Quaker, "From his little farm on the Rancocas he looked out with a mingled feeling of wonder and sorrow upon the hurry and unrest of the world; he regarded the merely rich man with unfeigned pity. With nothing of his scorn, he had all of Thoreau's commiseration for people who went about, bowed down with the weight of broad acres and great houses on their backs." The "scorn" of Thoreau and the "pity," of Woolman, sprang from a common root, however.
[8] The Hollowell Place, no doubt.
[9] In building this quaint structure, Thoreau was so averse to Mr. Alcott's plan of putting up and tearing down with no settled design of form on paper, that he withdrew his mechanic hand, so skillful in all carpenter work.