Page:Familiar letters of Henry David Thoreau.djvu/44

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20
YEARS OF DISCIPLINE.
[1838,

navigated by the Thoreaus. In 1837 the two brothers were sportsmen, and went shooting over the Concord meadows and moors, but of course the "buffalo" was a figure of speech; they never shot anything larger than a raccoon. A few years later they gave up killing the game.

to john thoreau (at taunton).

Concord, February 10, 1838.

Dear John,—Dost expect to elicit a spark from so dull a steel as myself, by that flinty subject of thine? Truly, one of your copper percussion caps would have fitted this nail-head better.

Unfortunately, the "Americana"[1] has hardly two words on the subject. The process is very simple. The stone is struck with a mallet so as to produce pieces sharp at one end, and blunt at the other. These are laid upon a steel line (probably a chisel's edge), and again struck with the mallet, and flints of the required size

  1. Americana, in this note, is the old Encyclopedia Americana, which had been edited from the German Conversations-Lexicon, and other sources, by Dr. Francis Lieber, T. G. Bradford, and other Boston scholars, ten years earlier, and was the only convenient book of reference at Thoreau’s hand. The inquiry of John Thoreau is another evidence of the interest he took, like his brother, in the Indians and their flint arrow-heads. The relics mentioned in the next letter were doubtless Indian weapons and utensils, very common about Taunton in the region formerly controlled by King Philip.