[81] The panic of 1857,—the worst since 1837.
[82] Reinhold Solger, Ph. D.,—a very intellectual and well-taught Prussian, who was one of the lecturers for a year or two at my "Concord School," the successor of the Concord "Academy," in which the children of the Emerson, Alcott, Hawthorne, Hoar, and Ripley families were taught. At this date the lectures were given in the vestry of the parish church, which Thoreau playfully termed "a meeting-house cellar." It was there that Louisa Alcott acted plays.
[83] Exclamation points and printer's devil.
[84] Channing says (Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist, new ed., pp. 41, 42): "He made for himself a knapsack, with partitions for his books and papers,—india-rubber cloth (strong and large and spaced, the common knapsacks being unspaced).... After trying the merit of cocoa, coffee, water, and the like, tea was put down as the felicity of a walking 'travail,'—tea plenty, strong, with enough sugar, made in a tin pint cup.... He commended every party to carry 'a junk of heavy cake' with plums in it, having found by long experience that after toil it was a capital refreshment."
[85] Marston Watson, whose uncle, Edward Watson, with his nephews, owned the "breezy island" where Thoreau had visited his friends (Clark's Island, the only one in Plymouth Bay), had built his own house, "Hillside," on the slope of one of the hills above Plymouth town, and there laid out a fine park and garden, which Thoreau surveyed for him in the autumn of 1854, Alcott and Mr. Watson carrying the chain. For a description of Hillside, see Channing's Wanderer (Boston, 1871) and Alcott's Sonnets and Canzonets (Boston: Roberts, 1882). It was a villa much visited by Emerson, Alcott, Channing, Thoreau, George Bradford, and the Transcendentalists generally. Mr. Watson graduated at Harvard two years after Thoreau, and in an old diary says, "I remember Thoreau in the college yard (1836) with downcast thoughtful look intent, as if he were searching for something; always in a green coat,—green because the authorities required black, I suppose." In a letter he says: "I have always heard the 'Maiden in the East' was Mrs. Watson,—Mary Russell Watson,—and I suppose there is no doubt of it. I may be prejudiced, but I have always thought it one of his best things,—and I have highly valued his lines. I find in my Dial, No. 6, I have written six new stanzas in the margin of Friendship, and they are numbered to show how they should run. I think Mrs. Brown gave them to me."
[86] Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist, new ed., pp. 42-45.
[87] Near which, at New Bedford, Mr. Ricketson lived.
[88] This was the "Orchard House," near Hawthorne's "Wayside." The estate on which it stands, now owned by Mrs. Lothrop, who also owns the "Wayside," was surveyed for Mr. Alcott by Thoreau in October, 1857.
[89] Channing's Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist, new ed., pp. 6, 15, 16. Channing himself was, no doubt, the "follower" and "companion" here mentioned; no person so frequently walked with Thoreau in his long excursions. They were together in New Boston, N. H., when the minister mentioned in the Week reproved Thoreau for not going to meeting on Sunday. When I first lived in Concord (March, 1855), and asked the innkeeper what Sunday services the village held, he replied, "There's the Orthodox, an' the Unitarian, an' th' Walden Pond Association,"—meaning by the last what Emerson called "the Walkers,"—those who rambled in the Walden woods on Sundays.
[90] Of New Bedford, first published in the Mercury of that city, while Channing was one of the editors, and afterwards in a volume.