ker-looking men and women here and there. There sat Mrs. Weld [Grimké] and her sister, two elderly gray-headed ladies, the former in extreme Bloomer costume, which was what you may call remarkable; Mr. Buffum, with broad face and a great white beard, looking like a pier head made of the cork-tree with the bark on, as if he could buffet a considerable wave; James G. Birney, formerly candidate for the presidency, with another particularly white head and beard; Edward Palmer, the anti-money man (for whom communities were made), with his ample beard somewhat grayish. Some of them, I suspect, are very worthy people. Of course you are wondering to what extent all these make one family, and to what extent twenty. Mrs. Kirkland (and this a name only to me) I saw. She has just bought a lot here. They all know more about your neighbors and acquaintances than you suspected.
On Monday evening I read the Moose story to the children, to their satisfaction. Ever since I have been constantly engaged in surveying Eagleswood,—through woods, salt marshes, and along the shore, dodging the tide, through bushes, mud and beggar ticks, having no time to look up or think where I am. (It takes ten or fifteen minutes before each meal to pick the beggar ticks out of my clothes; burs and the rest are left, and rents mended at the first convenient opportunity.) I shall be engaged perhaps as much longer. Mr. Spring wants me to help him about setting out an orchard and vineyard, Mr. Birney asks me to survey a small piece for him, and Mr. Alcott, who has just come down here for the third Sunday, says that Greeley (I left my name for him) invites him and me to go to his home with him next Saturday morning and spend the Sunday.
It seems a twelvemonth since I was not here, but I hope to get settled deep into my den again erelong. The hardest thing to find here is solitude—and Concord. I am at Mr. Spring's house. Both he and she and their family are quite agreeable.
I want you to write to me immediately (just left off to talk French with the servant man), and let father and mother put in a word. To them and to aunts,
The date of this visit to Eagleswood is worthy of note, because in that November Thoreau made the acquaintance of the late Walt Whitman, in whom he ever after took a deep interest. Accompanied by Mr. Alcott, he called on Whitman, then living at Brooklyn; and I remember the calm enthusiasm with which they both spoke of Whitman upon their return to Concord. "Three men," said Emerson, in his funeral eulogy of Thoreau (May, 1862), "have of late years strongly impressed Mr. Thoreau, John Brown, his Indian guide in Maine, Joe Polis, and a third person, not known to this audience." This last was Whitman, who has since become well known to a larger audience.
AGRIPPINA.
vol. lxix.—no. 416. 48
