[54] Mr. Ricketson's immediate reply was received by Thoreau before he wrote to Blake on the 22d. He set out from Concord for Cambridge on Christmas Day, and reached Brooklawn, the country-house of his friend, towards evening of that short day, on foot, with his umbrella and traveling-bag, and he made so striking a figure in the eyes of Ricketson that he sketched it roughly in his shanty-book. His children have engraved it in their pleasing volume Daniel Ricketson and his Friends, from the pages of which several of these letters are taken. It is by no means a bad likeness of the plain and upright Thoreau.
[55] Hyannis was once a port for the sailing of the steamers to Nantucket, where probably Thoreau was to land on his return. He had visited the Cape before, but never Nantucket. Thomas Cholmondeley went home with the distinct purpose of going to the Crimean war, and did so. The subject of the New Bedford lecture was "Getting a Living."
Channing, his wife and children having left him, was living by himself in his house opposite to Thoreau. Late in 1855 he rejoined Mrs. Channing, in a household near Dorchester, and became one of the editors of the New Bedford Mercury, residing in that city in 1856-57, after the death of Mrs. Channing.
[56] Quitman, aided perhaps by Laurence Oliphant, was aiming to capture Cuba with "filibusters" (flibustiers).
[57] Then President of the United States, whose life Hawthorne had written in 1852.
[58] I had been visiting Emerson occasionally for a year or two, and knew Alcott well at this time; was also intimate with Cholmondeley in the autumn of 1854, but had never seen Thoreau, a fact which shows how recluse were then his habits. The letter below, and the long one describing his trip to Minnesota, were the only ones I received from him in a friendship of seven years. See Sanborn's Thoreau, pp. 195-200. Edwin Morton was my classmate. See pp. 286, 353, 440.
[59] The book was Ultima Thule, describing New Zealand.
[60] This was Edmund Hosmer, a Concord farmer, before mentioned as a friend of Emerson, who was fond of quoting his sagacious and often cynical remarks. He had entertained George Curtis and the Alcotts at his farm on the "Turnpike," southeast of Emerson's; but now was living on a part of the old manor of Governor Winthrop, which soon passed to the ownership of the Hunts; and this house which Mr. Ricketson proposed to lease was the "old Hunt farmhouse,"—in truth built for the Winthrops two centuries before. It was soon after torn down.
[61] Sons of Mr. Ricketson; the second, a sculptor, modeled the medallion head of Thoreau reproduced in photogravure for the frontispiece of this volume.
[62] Mr. Channing had gone, October, 1855, to live in New Bedford, and help edit the Mercury there.