Chapter II (1)

At the age of twenty the student Henry Thoreau left the university with his bachelor’s degree. This was the recompense for four years passed away from Concord, four years save for the vacations and the time he had returned to spend with his family because of ill-health. As for this title, he may have given it its due--he was certainly not inclined to over-value it.

Upon entering college, he had left a village environment where equality was not a joke but a daily observance--left this environment to find himself, the child of small folk, suddenly thrown among the offspring of the fortunate ones of this world. In spite of the part-scholarship which they had obtained for him, his parents, his sister Helen, his aunts, in order to provide for the cost of his studies, had been obliged to deprive themselves. At college also, to be sure, a kind of equality prevailed among the students; but there it was an equality with a difference. He was a country boy among these wide-awake young men in whose eyes he was from the village indeed. Since his parents, his sister, had been obliged to scant themselves to purchase his right to a share of learning, he was inclined to feel certain things a little differently from the way he would have felt them if he had been the son of a senator.

He was assigned to a little room on a top floor of the hive. This was natural enough. Natural too that the young men in the neighbouring rooms liked to kick up a shindy when he wanted to work. But it only made him react the more strongly, and he dreamed.

This environment exhaled an odour that rather annoyed him, not so much because it had nothing in common with that of the new-mown hay of the Concord meadows but because it was the odour of an exclusive humanity, comfortably quartered in first-class state-rooms while the common passengers made shift as they could between decks. No doubt there were some charming fellows among these young men, and most of them were generous enough to treat a poor comrade as if he were one of themselves. And was it their fault, these college boys, if their papas travelled in the first class and the atmosphere that surrounded them was a first-cabin atmosphere? Among these sons of the well-to-do, future lawyers, future ministers, future diplomats, captains of industry, pillars of society, Henry felt out of his element. He was anything but in tune with them. With a secret pride in his plebeian hands, he exaggerated his reserve, his remoteness, his stiffness in the presence of these boys who knew so little of the world of toil. The hand he held out to them was nerveless. He was a Henry always absorbed in his own thoughts, with his eyes on the ground as if he were seeking something that did not grow there. He was, indeed, somewhere else. If he had hardly any real comrades, it was because he had no desire to make them. These well-dressed, jovial souls, with their special recreations, their fine parties, their student manners, left him surprisingly cold. Their sisters, their mothers had not had to deprive themselves to pay for their studies. He was the son of a little village shopkeeper, with a soul that already aspired very much higher than the great stores where they were to lord it.

Besides, he was decidedly rustic in his appearance, this oddly dressed scholarship-holder. He should have been dressed in black; it was the rule of the institution. The colleges see the world in black and he was here to adapt himself to their vision. But the only suit Henry had was a green one which his father had had made for him at great expense, and he was obliged to put it on every morning. There were evenings when, as he undressed, he wished that its greenness were still greener so as to be even more conspicuous among all these black backs. A good olive green is less shabby-looking than a black coat that is always threatening to let you see the thread. You must never let the thread be seen in this fine black-coated world.

And then in his secret soul homesickness tormented him. Everything he loved was out there, and it left a great void in his eighteen-year-old heart. When he heard the thrush singing in the college yard, Harvard ceased to exist, the library, the examinations he was preparing for.... Nothing remained but a dejected prisoner in his prison. Sometimes, as he bent over a textbook, the meaning of the words he read was lost in the sound of the wind that came to him in gusts from the woods of Concord, and with a wild bound the fancy of the exile leaped over the wall and sprang towards those dear haunted spots. It required a great effort to recall the heart-sick fugitive and set himself to work again in the cell of that austere building. At such moments as these, when he compared the quality of what he had left behind him and the cost of what he was acquiring, how could he help feeling in his bitterness that what he was missing was beyond price? The only remedy was to bury himself in study. All his free time Henry passed in the library, in the company of the classics or the old English poets, from Chaucer to the Elizabethans, who spoke to his solitary heart, a habit that rendered him still more unsociable and so isolated him that he felt, in this buzzing community, as if he were doing penance in the desert. That natural gravity, which had caused him to be nicknamed “the Judge” by his little playfellows of the village sleighing-parties, had not been softened by solitary study, his impressions as a college boy, his loneliness--far from it. The already taciturn child, who had given himself up to play passionately but with an utter seriousness, ultra-sensitive to everything that pricked his self-esteem, became still more self-absorbed the more he grew during these lean years. The hedgehog remained rolled up. It was as if he had something as precious as his life to safeguard and was protecting it fiercely. This student in his little room on the top floor was not one of those creatures that people tame.

Henry was not conspicuous for his success. He had made a good record in his studies, working hard to please himself. But in the examinations he had not shone. It was even remarked, not without surprise, among his professors, that this studious, gifted boy took no particular pains to distinguish himself; in the holder of a scholarship this was almost an offense and they had made him feel it. Thanks to the benefactors of the college his studies were partly paid for by the revenues of an old farm which he had to go and collect himself, braving the watch-dogs and the ill-humour of the unwilling farmer. In any case, it was a favour. A beneficiary should show his gratitude by exerting himself to the utmost and carrying off all the honours. When you are poor, you are expected to make up for this fault by your vigorous performances in composition.

He had read enormously aside from the curriculum and his preparation for examinations. And he had learned how to express himself. His early prose exhibits that firmness which is only acquired through a certain quality of mind after much thought and the assiduous following of the old masters. In some of his compositions and letters he reveals a surprising independence, that of a boy who sturdily believes in another civilization than that of the “civilized” and turns aside from the beaten roads to follow a road of his own where his instinct directs him better than the guide-posts. Hear this: “Our Indian is more of a man than the inhabitant of a city. He lives as a man, he thinks as a man, he dies as a man. The latter, it is true, is learned. Learning is Art’s creature, but it is not essential to the perfect man; it cannot educate....” Words of a solitary in the midst of the crowd, written in a temple of knowledge with the accent of faith and the pungency of revolt. At eighteen, he does not fear to make an apology for extremism, denouncing half-way solutions, the herd-spirit, the fear of being singular, the cowardice that follows the fashion and makes men “mere tools in the hands of others.” Henry wearing his green coat among the black costumes, far from apologizing for this incongruity, vigorously translates it into a rule of conduct. “We are a nation of speculators, stockholders and money-changers,” he writes before his nineteenth year, hinting at a native literature still to be born in the New World, “the establishment of a pure and nervous language.” And at the moment when he leaves Harvard, he attacks in his Commencement oration the spirit of lucre, the cur-spirit, with a vivacity, a conviction that slightly oversteps the tone of university controversy: “Could one examine this beehive of ours from an observatory among the stars, he would perceive an unwonted degree of bustle in these later ages.... Where he found one man to admire with him his fair dwelling-place, the ninety and nine would be scraping together a little of the gilded dust upon its surface.... This curious world which we inhabit is more wonderful than it is convenient; more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used. The order of things should be somewhat reversed: the seventh should be man’s day of toil, wherein to earn his living by the sweat of his brow; and the other six his Sabbath of the affections and the soul....”

He had emerged from the factory, but it had not succeeded in casting him in its mould. On the contrary, “the Judge” had judged it. It formed one of the wheels of a society which he was beginning to understand. Between mathematics, literature, the classics, the dead languages, some living truths had crept in, upon which Henry had seized, and he brought the latter home rolled up in his diploma like some happy find. With that society there, as it appeared to him, he could have very little to do. It was a machine of which the fly-wheels, the chains, the pinions were all too apparent to him. From the whole apparatus falsehood leaked like a sickening oil. Look sharp, my boy: if you do not, you will be snapped up.

All this knowledge which he had acquired in his four years of probation in the factory he measured with a lucid glance. An untutored fellow with the right quality could put in its place all the science of the colleges. A flash of the most everyday reality was enough to expose the poverty of a culture that formed such ignorant beings, such paupers in the face of life: little gentlemen with white hands who came there to be confirmed in the pale tradition of their class, “to study chemistry and not learn how [one’s bread] is made....”

At the same time he had undergone victoriously the ordeal of this famous culture. It had done him no harm. He regretted nothing: everything he had acquired, scanty as its weight might be in the destiny of a man, he would be able to put to his own use, employ for his own ends. He was going to dispose of knowledge; knowledge was not to have the best of him. It was a very good thing to possess, as an additional qualification, like a garment you put on when you need it and hang up again later when it burdens you. Others might take home from Harvard the beautiful uniform that people don for a lifetime. Henry had returned with his old green jacket.

Since he had come back, his family had observed a certain change in his replies, his attitude, his judgments. This decisive tone of their Henry and his radical views on the world were a little disturbing to those good people who had scraped together their dollars to send him off to college but had never possessed themselves an ounce of rebelliousness. So that was what they taught at Harvard? Insubordination? His aunts could hardly believe their ears; their nephew, expressing himself in this condemnatory fashion? His sister Helen who loved him dearly and firmly believed in him, Helen who, from her salary as a teacher, had contributed to pay Henry’s college expenses, even mildly urged him to moderate his expressions a little. The good girl had her illusions about the fond authority of an older sister: with his uncompromising sincerity he ceased for a while to write to her. She had not suspected that her brother would come home from Harvard with other resources besides “the old joke of a diploma.” She had remained the same Helen as ever, and he, after these years, had become a Henry multiplied by four.

In this month of August, 1837, a boy of twenty returned home who had mastered everything that college had to offer, in the books and outside the books. No need to press on to an A.M.; he knew quite enough. In this respect, if not in others, the years at Harvard were certainly worth the sacrifices that Helen and the father and the good aunts had made. The certitudes he had brought back were even worth the sacrifice the college boy had made of his free years of adolescence.

* * * * *

And now the problem was to earn his bread. The “old joke of a diploma” might help him just the same in finding a livelihood.

Since his final return to Concord, his father had undertaken a new business. He was manufacturing pencils. After the grocery and the odd-jobbing, this was a step up: a manufacturer, the creator of that beautiful thing, the hard casing with its marrowy flesh that a pencil is, destined to the noblest uses--reckoning up accounts, taking notes, drawing. For twenty years a pencil factory had existed at Concord when John Thoreau cleverly bethought himself of setting up in competition. It was rather bold for a little man who had been so unlucky hitherto and had such slender resources.

Before his college years and during his long vacations, Henry had lent a hand in the paternal workshop. It was their means of livelihood and the aid of the two boys was necessary. They worked together under the name of “John Thoreau and Son.” At the end of the summer of 1836, when a serious illness had obliged him to return home for several months, Henry had even accompanied his father to New York, whither they went to put their merchandise on the market. It was his first visit to the great metropolis, this visit as a commercial traveller who had come to offer the city folk an article that had issued from his village hands. The people of the metropolis obtained the softest and most perfect pencils directly from Europe; would they have any use for his stuff? Wait, you people of the metropolis, you spoiled folk who are so hard to please, one of these days we are going to show you something just as perfect, something better than your beautiful pencils from abroad.

But this was no sort of destiny for a college boy. Not for the sake of manufacturing pencils had he spent four years in college at the expense of his family. It would be disloyal to defeat their hopes, and circumstances at home were in rather a bad way. Now that he had his degree he would have to try something else. His Aunt Louisa was a schoolmistress, and so was Helen; John was very clever at teaching. They set him his example. Why should not he attempt the same thing? Why not, indeed? This was the first experiment to be tried with the armament of the “old joke.”

As a matter of fact, he had already had some experience in teaching. During his long college vacations, to assist his family in paying the other half of his expenses, he had followed the custom of students who are not born with a silver spoon in their mouths, and taught a little, as an assistant master, in the neighbouring villages; visiting in this way at Canton, just outside Boston, he had even learned a little German from the minister with whom he had stayed. This had brought him in a few dollars, and he had studied himself while he was teaching others. And now the time had come to find employment as a schoolmaster. To find such a position at Concord itself would be ideal, and it so happened that there was a vacancy in the Town School and he was accepted. In September, the month after his return, he was established there.

So there he was, one of the wheels of the machine. The respectable citizens had confided their children to him to teach them, not simply the three R’s, but sound principles as well. It was the immemorial Christian custom to inculcate sound principles upon the young by means of the rod. Henry, however, was not the flogging kind. He was going to talk to the young hopefuls as young hopefuls, appealing to their feelings as good boys. Everything went well or seemed to be going well; but there were eyes on the watch. These eyes saw what this innovation was leading to, the ruin of the moral foundations upon which Concord and the world rested. The master, this enemy of rods, had to reckon with the committee in charge of the school, one of whom was a certain Deacon--that same worthy man perhaps who also kept a store and with whom, not long before, the elder Thoreau had served his commercial apprenticeship. He or his like, it matters little: a guardian of the sound traditions. Whereupon His Morality the Deacon represented to the young master that his method was a menace to the discipline of the school. It was inadmissible. Henry had been appointed to a function that included the ritual distribution of the rod to scholars who deserved it. There were always in a class scholars who deserved the rod. He did not see them. He was not carrying out his function.

Very well. Since flogging formed a part of the work ordained in exchange for a salary, that very day the master took at random and punished conscientiously six boys of whom one at least was never to know what had suddenly seized this gentle master and was to cherish a bitter memory of him.... So there, Henry has earned his money. And now, good-bye, Deacon, good-bye, all of you. Go and find another master who will flog your school for you.... Henry had been a teacher for fifteen days. The wheel had hardly been put in place before it had sprung off.

Too bad, but he could go back to pencil-making. It was not exactly the thing he had dreamed of, but it was free work into which the Deacons did not thrust their pious noses. If he was obliged to ply the ferule to earn his living, he would go and pick huckleberries and sell them in the market. Or fish for pike and peddle them in the village, or take up any sort of work that wouldn’t oblige him to report to committeemen.

In spite of all this, he still wanted a school. He had the ability and it meant independence. Working with his father, he was a help, but he was dependent on his family, and they found it hard enough to make ends meet. The fall, the winter passed. How much he would have liked to go out and snatch a little air! There were moments like that. The surroundings of his childhood had been so dear to him that, stoical as he was by nature, the tears came to his eyes at the thought that some day he might have to leave them. But people had affronted him; he loathed his fellow-villagers. He wanted to push out into the world. But he wanted to go with John. To set out without John would be to sacrifice the best part of himself. For John was much more than his brother, he was the cream of all possible brothers. John the third was a delightful being who made him think that his grandfather, John the first, had crossed the ocean simply to prepare for his coming and make Concord an inestimable gift. John was a true Thoreau like Helen but with an exquisite charm, a flavour that belonged to him alone. Gifted as he was, none of his other gifts was equal to this faculty of making himself loved. He was a warm presence like a ray of sunlight and the freest-hearted companion to work with or to go off with, hunting, exploring--the two of them, Indian chiefs, older brother, younger brother, similar in their tastes, the gaiety of the one multiplied by the happiness of the other. Everything became possible, easy, everything brightened up, when John was with you. Would Concord have been Concord if Henry had not explored it and made it his own, during the whole of his childhood, with this perfect play-fellow?

Spring broke. Helen and Sophia would soon be leaving to take up their teaching at Roxbury. John was at present a schoolmaster at Taunton. Henry wrote to him. A friend of the family, settled in the West, assured him that they could have a fine situation if they were to go out there and open a school. What if they were to set off together?... What do you say, brother? If we were to go out there and set up a _real_ cabin, far away from these deacons and respectable numskulls, in some raw, half-built town or out on the open prairie? We could borrow money for the expenses of the journey, and as for the rest we have workingman’s hands, we are not afraid of adventure, we could pull through. What couldn’t we do, the two of us together?... Henry was pressing. Stagnation weighed on him; on the river the ice was breaking. He longed to undertake something. It was high time to begin. And if his brother was willing.... A few weeks later he heard of a school that was going to be opened in Virginia. He was certainly going down there if they wanted him.... And soon after the question of another school came up, in Maine, where his cousins were. He went up there and came back the same hungry Henry as before, in spite of the brilliant certificate he was able to show, signed with fine names, among them R. W. Emerson.

Well, then, if they didn’t want him and his diploma anywhere he would change his plans. That was settled. His father and mother lived in a house in the centre of the village: it was big enough for them to open a private school there. John and Henry would teach at home, free from all prying committees. They counted on finding pupils.

They did not count in vain. They had four already, and the promise of a fifth. Henry, urged to begin in June, had not waited for his brother’s arrival. As soon as the latter came he took over the direction of the school. Henry took charge of the Latin, Greek, French, physics and mathematics. They were so successful that they were obliged to think of moving the school for the following year: their father’s house was no longer big enough to hold it. Just then the building of the Academy, where Henry had been prepared for college, became vacant, and they took up quarters there. It looked as if the Thoreau school was going to become the Academy. But not to underrate its masters, when had the latter ever had such a director? A John, with this art of teaching children and understanding a school as John understood it?

Very strange, the method of the two brothers. They obtained discipline without punishment or threats. How did they manage this? All the deacons in New England might well ask. They interested their pupils, won them, attached them to themselves by a living bond, that between the man-child and the child-man. Study ceased to be a mere heaping up of ennui and constraint; it was a conversation between brothers. With the money which the rod would have cost they had bought a little common sense and good will; and though the pedants could not pardon these two presumptuous souls, the pupils worked, the pupils stayed. Boys of ten to fifteen came to listen to the two young masters, the elder of whom had made them promise, when they entered, to do their best, and the boys kept their promise because they were listening to a master who was their friend. If they missed now and then, the punishment was to remind them that they had not kept their word. No one dreamed of playing pranks, yawning with misery or pulling wings off flies when the master told stories or prolonged the recess playing with the boys himself. The delightful invitations of the out-of-doors were less tantalizing in a class where penal tasks were unknown. Outside the lessons there was an attachment between the young master and the pupils created by a thousand little subtle bonds such as ordinary pedagogues, with their crass ignorance and their ferules, cannot imagine.

You arrived at school in the morning and, opening your desk, you found a beautiful slice of melon there. You thought it was a joke that one of the boys was playing on you. Not at all: John, your teacher, knowing that you had a sweet tooth, was unostentatiously offering you a taste of the melons from his garden; he was proud of them, for he and his brother raised them, and this year they had a wonderful crop. A slice of melon adds to study a taste which the poor imagination of the pedants knows nothing of. It is refreshing, delectable, and the flavour lingers in the lesson you are reciting. Especially the kind of melons that John and Henry raised--those succulent citron-melons.

Besides, the school did not consist entirely in the lectures, the lessons and the compositions. It spread out to include the more familiar concerns before, after class, during recess, in the street. If you came across John outside school, you ran to meet him of your own accord, joined him and went part of the way with him. He was grown up, your professor, but you were not afraid of him, for his friendliness effaced these distances. Henry, who taught the big boys, had a colder, soberer air; when you saw him going by, you had no desire to joke with this personage who knew Greek and Latin. But you had only to wait till you became his pupil. When you knew him better, how much you wanted to overtake him too in the street after class and walk along with him, hand in hand, and how much you were rewarded by the stories and the amusing things he told you! Henry was as much your friend as John.

At school they also studied surveying--a beautiful chance to go out for a walk and have lessons in the open country. Henry was the one who showed the boys how to draw up a plan. And one afternoon each week they had school in the open air; the whole crew, masters and pupils, poured out into the woods, plunged into the meadow grass, for the most enlightening of object-lessons. Then which of them all was more of a boy than Henry? Which was the fastest runner? The most indefatigable gatherer of huckleberries? The most enraptured of them all? Anyone who saw him exulting with this troop of schoolchildren would have said that it was he who poured this childlike zest into the others, as if he possessed an inexhaustible store. You, teacher of Greek and Latin, will never be, under your grave airs, anything but a youngster. They are not mistaken, the good people who say this, smiling disdainfully as they see you pass. For they are men, austere, dignified men, weighed down by cares, exhaling an odour of old prayer-books and warranty deeds.

Sometimes Henry carried off a pupil for a swim in a pond or a boating party on the river; they made discoveries; they landed on unknown shores. All this was part of the school and helped to keep up the spirit of comradeship. One day young Edmund Sewall took his place in the boat--Edmund, who was so like his big sister Ellen of whom John and Henry were particularly fond. Ellen was the daughter of the minister of Scituate. Her grandmother and her aunt, old friends of the family, boarded with the Thoreaus; and when the girl came to Concord to see them, gay parties were organised and they had beautiful evenings at home. Ellen’s fresh seventeen years had made an impression on the two brothers. But it was the lovable John especially who made an impression on her. Presently he had in his class this young Edmund, whose charm haunted him and to whom he was devoted because behind the child’s face rose that of the big sister, his play-fellow, the thought of whom sometimes made him dream and gave him the desire to say to the pupil tender things that might have been addressed equally well to her.

At home they met again, for the Thoreaus boarded and lodged those youngsters whose parents did not live in the village. They sat at the same table, masters, pupils, boarders, old friends, and the vivacity of the mother presided over the family meal. It was no banquet, for they had neglected to be rich, but the bread tasted better than elsewhere, and the vegetables came from the garden. The school was only a step from the house. They carried the homelike atmosphere over with them. Is that why the memory of these years--years in which two brothers, in a village, taught them what they knew--was to flavour the whole lives of those who had passed through the Thoreau school? You worked well there, better than anywhere else, and the study left no musty taste behind it. What was John and Henry’s secret? They were no lesson-mongers. And so when the parents of a pupil who interested them found it difficult to pay for his studies they asked the parents to let them keep him for nothing. Let him come and work with the others; time enough to talk about money later.

Nor did the pupils take up all their time. The day is long when you are twenty-five; it knows how wonderful it is and turns slowly, slowly, so as to give you the leisure to admire all its aspects. The hours of school left a beautiful margin of independence: the morning, the very early morning, the glorious late afternoons in summer, and the Sundays, and the vacations! When Henry had finished in the garden, put to rights this or that little matter in the house, off he went! All the surroundings of Concord awaited him. The woods were waiting for him, the fish in the river, those luxuriant plants, swollen with sap, which nobody ever looked at, on the edge of the marsh. He had to go and get the latest news of them. So Henry seized his gun and set off on a stroll through the woods. Perhaps to-day he would bring back some rare bird to study, for he had a true passion for the birds, the plants, and all the creatures of the open air. In any case, he would undoubtedly bring back something, if only the certainty of his own happiness in the woods. This man who was setting out, with his gun on his shoulder, for the fields, was no common huntsman in quest of game; he might not take a single shot with his gun, but he would not return with an empty bag. There are different kinds of good hunting. The discoveries, the surprises, the confirmations, an attention awakened by a certain phenomenon do not fill your game-bag, but fur and feathers would not satisfy you half so much. Henry would pick up an Indian arrow-head to add to his collection. His brother and he were immensely interested in these finds. One day, as a token of their respect for the red aborigines who had once been the kings of the country, they raised a cenotaph to the memory of a sachem on Fairhaven Hill, where they had often come as boys to watch the sunrise. They were fond of the names the former rulers had left everywhere, full of the calls of animals, twittering birds, murmuring winds, gliding waters, roaring cataracts.

Henry took his fishing-rod and set out through the fields in search of a good nook on the river. He might perhaps bring back some fish. But to catch fish, when he went fishing, was not, after all, the finest part of the adventure. The river had many other presents to make him besides its fish. He even had fishing-parties when the fish were only an unimportant incident, as, for example, on a calm, warm evening, when he set off with an eel-spear, at the break of spring, before the fish had begun to hide among the tall reeds or in the deep water. He fastened a grating to the bow of his boat, a yard above the water, where he burned resinous roots. From a distance it looked like a will-o’-the-wisp in the meadows. For himself, in the boat, armed with his long harpoon, it was like sailing in the midst of enchantment. The water was so violently illumined over a large space all round the bow that he could stare down many feet into the depths and surprise the fish in the inmost recesses of their hiding-places. Strange sojourners, some of whom seemed to be asleep or dreaming, others very wide-awake, the latter ferocious in their aspect, the former on their backs as if they were floating ... They had so little fear of the monster who brandished the iron and the fire over their abodes that he could have caught them with a fork, as you spear a potato in the pot, or could even seize the sleepers with his hand. But as he was not a mere brute, the most thrilling thing was not the basket of fish he might have brought home but the spectacle itself, the supernatural beauty of the reflexions of the flames in the water, on the willows and the pines on the bank. Surprised by this brutal dawn, a song-sparrow wakened and began to sing as if it were morning--singing for Henry who, in this raw glow that cut the shadows, rowed along in silence, groping his way, listening, meditating....

Most radiant of all were the times when he left gun, fishing-rod, boat and harpoon behind for a simple ramble on foot when the earth seemed to respond to the pressure of his soles and his being dilated as if all the good news carried through space were addressed especially to him. This is what Henry felt every time he explored the country of his childhood, in hours of liberty, finding once more the old confidences and secret favours in those nooks he had left behind in the days of his homesickness.

Invariably the schoolmaster’s day closed with another escape. Every evening, before going to bed, he gathered together, worked over, expressed with the greatest exactness to a sure and discreet confidant the most secret impressions of the day. Since his return from Harvard he had formed the habit of this daily rendezvous with this other self who never betrayed him and would never bore him with complaints and expostulations but accepted everything. Later on, this was going to be an unexceptionable witness when, published to the world, it would reply to those who questioned it. The solitude of the college years had developed in him a natural tendency to examine himself--the taste for the inner dialogue. All the knowledge we acquire through study or the society of others will never compensate for our indifference where our own souls are concerned. This is a subject for study that is worth all the pains you devote to it--a book that is of more importance for you to read than those that lie on your shelf. And this over and above the fact that when you have read it you will be prepared to understand other books and other men. Henry was anxious to know where he stood in relation to himself. An orderly man does not go to bed without making up his accounts.

Henry confided to his Journal his intimate thoughts, his discoveries of the day. He reckoned up his stock. To what end? He would see later on. In the meantime, a man who was aware of what he possessed slipped, with his spirit at peace, into sheets that were as white as the page of to-morrow.

* * * * *

To have the good luck to be born on the brink of two rivers, to be twenty years, twenty-five years old, to have a hearty, open-air appetite, and not to have a boat, is a flaw in the happiness of a man. Fishing or swimming, loafing about the banks or skating on its firm back, you have never known the joy of the river if it has not taken you and rocked you, led you, carried you off, made you dance at its own will and pleasure.

If you were to build a boat?... You can find the timber, you have a few tools and fingers that know how to handle a piece of wood. A real boat. Not a mere dugout such as Henry had made when he was nineteen, a dugout that looked like an oblong trough, though even that was better than a tub in which you drift with the current; it was delightful; it did not move swiftly, but with patience and skill you could risk yourself in it for a quarter of an hour’s adventure. No, a real boat this time, a boat that really travels over the water. If you bought one, or had it built by a boat-builder, you would spend a lot of money and have nothing but the joy of the boat itself; whereas if you made it with your own hands you would also have the joy of building it.

To assemble your materials for building a boat in the open air, in the first days of spring, is a very different pleasure from expounding the Odyssey; you feel as if you were living like a man of Homer’s day, you inhale in advance the scent of discovery. To wield the saw and the hammer, take your careful measurements, fit together the pieces of the body, see the work taking form, to be two brothers under the sky, busy in your dock-yard, among your tools, your timber, striking with precision, trimming neatly, responsible to nobody--schoolmaster as you are, the gods that roam New England on their tour of inspection might envy you, those gods who have never had the joy of building a boat themselves. John and Henry’s hearts are in their work. At the end of one week the masterpiece is finished. It is a dory, heavy and strongly built, with a sharp bow, such as fishermen use; it is fifteen feet long by three and a half in breadth at the middle. A real craft: you can move about in it, sail it, stow away a little cargo in it. A good coat of paint will protect it and give it a tidier appearance. As it is destined to take part in open-air holidays on the water, it must be painted green with a blue border. The painting is done in a jiffy, and then comes the glorious moment when with a final glance the creators survey their creation, weaned at last from themselves and ready to face the broad daylight of the world.... For legs the dory has wheels that will enable it to be rolled around falls.

Nothing remains now but to equip it. It must have two sets of oars, poles, two masts; you must foresee everything when you have these vast projects in your head. As the boat is going to carry you a long way and you are going to camp out under the stars, the tent is indispensable. Then there is no limit to your dreams. With a boat and a tent you can sail round a continent, coast along all the shores, disembark on an island, set up your tent there, light a fire and survey the landscape with that knowing air: It’s I, exactly. Do you recognize me?... Yes, you can do unbelievable things with this boat. You can begin to enjoy the world, measure the amplitude of the earth. You can carry Concord with you to all sorts of strange countries, scour the land, found colonies.

Meanwhile, you begin experimenting with it, you lose no time, you are prouder of being a good mariner than a good schoolmaster and you invite the boys on board to teach them things that are not to be found in the books. New aspects of the world are revealed, you make important discoveries, for you are the man who has a boat.

To think there were so many unknown things around you: brooks, mountains, buildings, men, flocks of ducks, and all the people on the banks--unsuspected neighbours! If it were not for the school, you would like to follow the watery road as far as ever it could lead you. Concord widens into a vast province, as if newly peopled with animals and landscapes and surprises. In the succession of the springs and the summers, this spring of the year 1839 will always bear for you the colours of the boat--green and blue, will bear a sail swelling against a mast, which two brothers have planed with their own hands in an open-air dock-yard.

When you really know your boat you are ready for the decisive adventures for which it has been fitted out. The long vacation has come. Your departure is fixed for Saturday, the last day of August. This is to be no mere airing before supper: it is the great embarkation for a week or two weeks, for good and all--who knows?--for the fabulous regions where men speak another language.

John and Henry have made plans to go all the way to the White Mountains by water, from little Concord, their village, to big Concord, the capital of New Hampshire. It is a plan that requires some reflexion. They have thought it over and made up their minds, and they are to set out to-morrow. Preparations, the cargo. First the tent and a buffalo-skin; then a few tools, some utensils for their cooking; as provisions in reserve some potatoes and melons from their own patch. Do not laugh, you sceptics. You don’t know what it is to have at hand, under all circumstances, a fruit whose virtues are perfectly known to you. And isn’t it like having on board a friendly presence, a remembrance of the garden, that will bring the pilgrims good luck on their perilous voyage? Like the boat itself, the melons are the fruit of their own labour, and thus, without borrowing anything from anyone, they set forth, side by side, for the conquest of the world.

At last, the thrilling moment. Vain for you your Harvard diploma, vain your teaching of Greek and Latin this August afternoon, when you finally jump into the boat that awaits you, all provisioned, and gently gives under your feet. What are your learning and your evening dreams beside the certitude that floods you with happiness like a child, beside the glamour of this dazzling day and this running water that is going to carry you to the beyond?... Books? The most beautiful of them all is a thousand times less beautiful to you than that which this rude dory under your oars and your sail is eager to bring you. Wisdom? Listen to that rippling along the bank; the river whispers to you as it passes that she herself is wisdom--and how your soul responds to the invitation of the voyage!

It has rained in the morning, as if the gods of the Concord had wished to thwart the plans of two good boys who are setting out in search of them; but this only makes the smile of the afternoon more calm. Come along, off we go! Good-bye, friends. A cup of air to your health! A little further on, as a final farewell from the navigators, a salvo of joy which the forest echoes after noting it on its leaves. The sounds of the village are stilled, you sink into a deep dream, rhythmical with the gliding of the oars. You slip along this road that runs, buoyant, fresh, through the recesses of the landscape. You surprise it, as it were, gently, in its privacy, not seizing it by the throat as you do on those beastly, dusty roads where the world leaves its dung and the imprint of its iron feet. The watery way flows on and carries you past the willows, the waterplants with their white and rose-coloured flowers, the meadow grass with the faded tints of the closing summer. A bittern sails away, a tortoise drops into the water. From afar the familiar heights salute you courteously. Farewell, village, farewell, last fisherman with your motionless line and your dog.

We are rowing towards fresh promises: see how the river widens out. We pull straight ahead, in cadence, not like apprentices. The evening draws in; it makes good rowing, and what good haying it ought to be at this hour for those reapers over there, almost lost in the grass of the meadows, where every blade they cut seems to exhale a sigh of gladness and commit it to the breeze, the courier of the evening. It is time to look for a good place for the night. We are seven miles from Concord. Billerica already.... It is astonishing what this name stands for when you have been rowing for hours and are ready to pitch your tent on _terra firma!_ And here are some ripe huckleberries for dessert The fire crackles. A good cup of cocoa, some bread. And sunset to finish the meal. Before you, as far as the horizon, nothing but a solitary farmhouse, far away, lost in the glorious wilderness, amid the clumps of pines, the hills, the rocks, all the squatting people of the brush. Fireflies in the grass. The good night awaits the two of you under the cotton tent that is fastened to one of the masts. But the hour is so captivating, this August evening is so charged with messages in the depths of the silence, that you have no desire to go to sleep at once. Neighbours betray their presence. A fox makes his rounds; some creature fumbles among the potatoes and melons in the boat, disappearing into the water when you go to see what it is. On the horizon a great blaze from a fire over in Lowell; the fire-alarm reaches you in snatches, mingled with the barking of the watch-dogs from invisible farms. Two lads who have rowed with a will roll themselves up in the buffalo-skin and close their eyes on the thought of the boat moored by the clump of alders for the next day. Good night, brother. Good night, Henry. How about the school?... And the eight, ten, twelve, fifteen days like this one to look forward to? Blow out the lantern.

Sunday morning. You come out of your tent into the mist of the dawn and light the fire for breakfast. Then, like the pagan you are, oblivious of the fall of man, fold up the tent and embark with your Sunday soul in the rising sun that disperses the fog. You give names to the spots along the way, the hills, cliffs, woods, as fresh as if no human eye had ever touched them. The river is a mirror: it is Sunday on the water, too, and you hesitate to disturb it with a stroke of your oar. A skiff passes with two men, gliding so lightly that it seems almost unreal among the reflexions of the foliage in the water. The meditation of the frogs, motionless on the reeds, contemplating the day of the Lord’s rest, is tinged with the grave Sabbath beauty.

Just above the Billerica Falls they take the canal through the woods, and one of the two mariners pulls the dory with the rope along the tow-path as far as the dam. The people are coming out of church in the village and the good folk look down from the height of the bridge upon these two good-for-nothings who are voyaging along, just as if the Lord’s day were not made to cement the nothingness of the week that has passed with the nothingness of that which is dawning. But the lock-keeper is more liberal-minded: he knows two merry souls, out for adventure, when he sees them, and he opens the locks for them, in spite of the Sunday rule. The lock-keepers of this world are broad enough to redeem its narrowness.

And now they find themselves on the Merrimac, the great river. The dory is a mere insect striking out on this sheet of water, one hundred, two, four hundred yards wide, over which every sound glances and comes to you with a marvellous clearness. Those children repeating their catechism in a cottage are a good third of a mile away from you who catch the murmur of their voices; or is it that the words of the catechism have a miraculous carrying-power? The cows in the meadow do not know their catechism; they are content to be beautiful in silence and enrich the look of those villages with their tiny harbours and their fairylike setting. The boat has burst into a new part of the world; this is the valley that leads up into the heart of New Hampshire by a succession of natural dams, with a rapid, leaping current of yellowish water cut by falls. When you have rowed since morning against the current, your nooning is very precious in the shade of an apple-tree. It is Chelmsford here, the village where your parents came once to seek their fortune. The hour is so beautiful under this apple-tree that you would like to read a poem as ample as the landscape of the valley; when Sunday chimes within you and as far as the horizon, you would like all this music to be crowned in that of a poem.

See those islets. High up on one of them are perched two men who hail the little craft, asking to be taken off. But there are the melons, the tent, a whole outfit on board, and with this cargo the dory already has enough trouble making headway against the stream. Can’t be done, boys; you will have to make _terra firma_ and Nashua on foot. Good luck! Further on, what is this enormous fish whose back rises and sinks in mid-stream? A sturgeon? A monster? Look out there: with a blow of that assuredly formidable tail it could send to the bottom two brothers and their fortune. But no, this old fraud that is going to capsize us is nothing but a wooden spar fixed there as a buoy to warn sailors of sunken rocks....

The sun sets, twilight creeps in; shall we think of resting, like the fish who, save for a few that prowl all night, are preparing themselves for sleep? You have stretched out the most beautiful of Sundays as long as you could between the two shores and rowing hard against this strong current. You have well earned the favourable spot for pitching your tent and tasting the sleep of adventurers.

The earth is firm and sweet under your feet when you trample it after a whole day tossing about in a walnut-shell. You unload the provisions, like conquistadors who have reached a far country after countless perils, arrived at a shore where you will make yourself understood by signs to the natives, if any appear. Once the lantern is hung to the tent-pole, the fire ready, the kettle on the fire, you are at home; nothing is missing to make life solid and satisfying. After closing the tent, Henry scribbles a few notes in the glimmering light of the lantern: the shore journal of the navigators. And after a little chat they go to sleep in the buffalo-skin. On the opposite bank, some Irish labourers on the railroad are celebrating the Sabbath with wild shouts, whirling up and down the track. But their brawling is not loud enough to disturb the sleep of the two oarsmen who soon forget where they are. The two lads are dead to the world among all the sleeping creatures who, like them, have drained the happiness of Sunday on the banks. Alone, the river, eager to reach its end, pursues all night its course to the sea; its adventure will brook no delay.