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[176] UT [Reminiscences of Henry Thoreau] (1903) George F. Hoar Brother of Thoreau’s friends Edward and Elizabeth, George Frisbie Hoar (1826–1904) graduated from Harvard College in 1846 and became a lawyer in Concord. From 1869 through 1877, he served in the United States House of Representatives; he was elected in 1877 to the U.S. Senate, in which he served until his death. This brief recollection illustrates Hoar’s respect for Thoreau’s creative process and intellectual curiosity. i knew henry thoreau very intimately. I went to school with him when I was a little boy and he was a big one. Afterward I was a scholar in his school. . . . He knew the best places to find huckleberries and blackberries and chestnuts and lilies and cardinal and other rare flowers. We used to call him Trainer Thoreau, because the boys called the soldiers the “trainers,” and he had a long, measured stride and an erect carriage which made him seem something like a soldier, although he was short and rather ungainly in figure. He had a curved nose which reminded one a little of the beak of a parrot. His real name was David Henry Thoreau, although he changed the order of his first two names afterward. He was a great finder of Indian arrowheads , spear-heads, pestles, and other stone implements which the Indians had left behind them, of which there was great abundance in the Concord fields and meadows. He knew the rare forest birds and all the ways of birds and wild animals . Naturalists commonly know birds and beasts and flowers as a surgeon who has dissected the human body, or perhaps sometimes a painter who has made pictures of them knows men and women. But he knew birds and beasts as one boy knows another—all their delightful little habits and fashions. He had the most wonderful good fortune. We used to say that if anything happened in the deep woods which only came about once in a [177] hundred years, Henry Thoreau would be sure to be on the spot at the time and know the whole story. . . . I retained his friendship to his death. I have taken many a long walk with him. I used to go down to see him in the winter days in my vacations in his hut near Walden. He was capital company. He was a capital guide in the wood. He liked to take out the boys in his boat. He was fond of discoursing . I do not think he was vain. But he liked to do his thinking out loud, and expected that you should be an auditor rather than a companion. I have heard Thoreau say in private a good many things which afterward appeared in his writings. One day when we were walking, he leaned his back against a rail fence and discoursed of the shortness of the time since the date fixed for the creation, measured by human lives. “Why,” he said, “sixty old women like Nabby Kettle” (a very old woman in Concord), “taking hold of hands, would span the whole of it.” He repeats this in one of his books, adding, “They would be but a small tea-party, but their gossip would make universal history.” George F. Hoar, Autobiography of Seventy Years, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1903), 70–72. George F. Hoar ...

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