An old Concordian has favored me with some of the village impressions of Julian Hawthorne and others of that semi-Pagan annex to the Hub. "Did you know Thoreau?" I asked.
        "I should say I did. We used to go, at his invitation, on huckle-excursions with him. We used to call him ’Henry.’ Some of the town’s people didn’t like him at all, and thought him a sort of hermit boor, but he was very kind to children. He loved birds and the woods, and hated to see birds shot or rabbits trapped. He would not have harmed a fly. His rustication out on the shore of Walden Pond was a good deal of an affectation. He would have starved, if it had not been that his sisters and mother cooked up pies and doughnuts and sent them to him in a basket. The trouble with Thoreau was that he tried to live on an intellectual east wind. He died young, but would have lived on for years had his diet been roast beef and mutton chops. Thoreau was a good deal of a wag in a quiet humorous way. He once put cloth bandages on the claws of Mrs. Emerson’s hens, that good lady having been sorely tried by her fowls invading the family flower patch. I guess Mrs. Emerson invented the notion of gloving her hens, and Thoreau carried out her instructions to the letter, and then went off and had his laugh out."