NOTES
with my hands than is necessary. My head is hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore-paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts: so by the divining rod and thin rising vapours I judge: and here I will begin to mine.”
Again: “If my curve is large, why bend it to a smaller circle?”
Emerson wrote of Thoreau: “He who sees the horizon may securely say what he pleases of any twig or tree between him and it.”
Page 54, note 1. “The Regicides,” Edward Goffe and William Whalley, distinguished officers under Cromwell, who, proscribed after the Restoration, fled to New England and with a price set on their heads lived to old age hidden among the hills near Hadley and New Haven.
Page 65, note 1. Allusion has been made to the time when Staples became Emerson's next neighbour and on the survey it appeared that the partition ditch was well over on the land of the latter. The matter being generously settled, Thoreau came into the house and sat down to rest in the study. He said: “I like Sam Staples; he has no hypocrisy about him. He has just been telling me how he came to Concord, nineteen years old, after a hard-worked boyhood,
136
