Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/187

1843, he mentions Alcott's refusal to pay his taxes and his narrow escape from arrest; his opposition was fully concurred in by Thoreau and Alcott's English friend, Lane. In "Walden" is a simple yet dramatic recital of Thoreau's own experience:—"One afternoon, near the end of the first summer, when I went to the village to get a shoe from the cobbler's, I was seized and put into jail, because, as I have elsewhere narrated, I did not pay a tax to or recognize the authority of the state which buys and sells men, women, and children, like cattle at the door of the state-house." Samuel Staples, the jailor, whose recent death has removed another link between Thoreau's Concord and the town of to-day, delighted to recount his prisoner's demeanor, his interested study of his fellow-prisoners, his anger when his Aunt Maria in disguise paid his tax, his reluctance to leave the jail, and his departure, with his mended shoe, as "captain of a huckleberry-party." While these incidents have semblance to the acts of a mere poseur, they yet indicate the fontal source of Thoreau's opposition. In the essay upon "Civil Disobedience," he complains of the false interpretation placed upon this experience in jail;—"I felt as if I alone of all my townsmen had paid my tax. They plainly did not know how to treat me but behaved like persons who are under-