Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/156

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THE WALDEN EXPERIMENT

pried into my cupboard and bed when I was out." While he greeted all honest visitors with "Welcome, Englishmen," it would have been incompatible with his temperament if he had not arraigned the sham visitors, called thither by prurient criticism. With grim satire, he wrote;—"Finally, there were the self-styled reformers, the greatest bores of all who thought that I was forever singing,

This is the house that I built;
This is the man that lives in the house that I built;

but they did not know that the third line was

These are the folks that worry the man
That lives in the house that I built!"

At one time an impression was abroad that the Walden hut was a station in the underground railway for fugitive slaves, but this error has been corrected by Colonel Higginson. Thoreau mentions one "real runaway slave among the rest, whom I helped to forward towards the North Star."

All who have written or spoken their memories of this Walden lodge have testified to its neatness and charm and the quiet, cordial hospitality of its owner. In "Walden" is a subtle suggestion of a yearning and listening for "the visitor who never