Thoreau writes in his journal:
P.M.—Walk to Quinsigamond Pond, where was good skating yesterday, but this very pleasant and warm day it is suddenly quite too soft. I was just saying to Blake [H.G.O. Blake] that I should look for hard ice in the shade, or [on the] north side, of some wooded hill close to the shore, though skating was out of the question elsewhere, when, looking up, I saw a gentleman and lady very gracefully gyrating and, as it were, courtesying to each other in a small bay under such a hill on the opposite shore of the pond . . .
Thoreau lectures in H.G.O. Blake’s parlors, probably on “An Excursion to Maine Woods.”
Sallie Holley writes to a Mrs. Porter on 28 February:
The last two evenings we had in Worcester, we were at two parlour lectures given by Mr. Henry D. Thoreau, the author of that odd book, Walden, or Life in the Woods. The first lecture was upon “Autumnal Tints,” and was a beautiful and, I doubt not, a faithful report of the colours of leaves in October. Some of you may have read his “Chesuncook,” in the Atlantic Monthly; if so you can fancy how quaint and observing, and humorous withal, he is as traveller—or excursionist—companion in wild solitudes. Several gentlemen, friends of his, tell us much of their tour with him to the White Mountains last summer, of his grand talk with their guide in “Tuckerman’s Ravine,” where they had their camp. He paid us the compliment of a nice long morning call after we heard him read his “Autumnal Tints,” and remembered our being once at his mother’s to tea, and Miss Putnam’s looking over his herbarium with his sister.
