recited Cato's soliloquy with perfect composure and contentment. Well might a gifted woman exclaim, 'She looks like a queen,' when death at last had claimed the resolute spirit, and she lay silently receiving her friends for the last time."
Among many records of her kindliness are two extracts from letters in the Life of Father Hecker by Rev. Walter Elliott, published in recent years. Isaac Hecker, the eccentric baker at Brook Farm and later proselyte to Catholicism, as a young man, came to Concord to study the classics with Mr. George Bradford and boarded with the Thoreaus. In letters to his mother in 1844, he describes his pleasant room, its window shaded with sweet honeysuckle and visited by humming-birds. He adds,—"The lady of the house, Mrs. Thoreau, is a woman. The only fear I have about her is that she is too much like dear mother—she will take too much care of me." Both Mr. and Mrs. Thoreau were deeply interested in botany and physical geography. With their children and guests they visited the haunts about Concord, collected specimens of plants, rocks, and insects, little realizing that their son was to become America's greatest nature-poet.
Thus the complex inheritance of the four Thoreau children mingled reserve and gayety, dogged and
