Mrs. H. M. Plunkett.
weather-worn coat, strong gray trousers, and stout shoes; if in his usual mood, his gait was dead in earnest, and his disposition "iron-pokerish," as Hawthorne styled it. Once on the way, as he says, he was taken for a peddler because of his tin cup; once for a Williamstown student, by a "frank and hospitable young woman," who stood by the roadside "in deshabille, busily and unconcernedly combing her long black hair." Her "living, sparkling eyes" must have caught his fancy, for he stopped to speak with her, —what student would not? In
the course of their conversation she told him that parties of students went by, either riding or walking, almost every pleasant day, and then unwittingly added that they were "a pretty wild set of fellows"; whence Thoreau, if he was acquainted with syllogisms, must have drawn his own conclusions as to her idea of himself. He was used to being taken for an umbrella mender, a clock cleaner and peddler; and, as he probably had none of the Apostle Peter's weakness, he could stand being taken even for a Williamstown student. The summit was reached at sunset. Nothing is more characteristic of Thoreau's hermit life, its odd and ingenious phases, than this night's experiences. He was thirsty. Following the path down to where the ground was oozy and water stood in the tracks of the horses, he says, "I lay down flat and drank these dry one after another, having failed to fill my dipper, though I contrived little siphons of grass-stems and ingenious aqueducts on a small scale." Then came supper, —North Adams rice eaten with a wooden spoon whittled on the spot. The evening was passed reading a newspaper left by some luncheon party— he never was known to read one where they were plenty! As it grew colder he encased himself completely in boards, putting a large stone on top "to keep them down and so sleep comfortably." "For," he says, "we are constituted a good deal like chickens, which, taken from the hen and put in a basket of cotton in the chimney corner, will often peep till they die; nevertheless, if you put in a book, or anything heavy which will press down the cotton and feel like the hen, they go to sleep directly." Some mice came during the night to eat up the crumbs. His stoical indifference to their approach is amusing: "They nibble what was for them; I nibble what was for me." On the other hand, nothing is more characteristic of the lofty and poetical side of his character than his description of sunrise the following morning. His was the poetic eye without the lyric gift. In advance of day he had mounted the tower; a thick mist extending just to its base shut out all else from view, leaving him "floating on this fragment of a wreck of a world, on my carved plank in cloudland." "There was not a crevice left through which the trivial places we name Massachusetts, Vermont, and New York could be seen." Then, by and by, the sun came up over the snowy pastures and shady vales of cloudland, and he found himself "drifting among the saffron-colored clouds and playing with the rosy fingers of the dawn, in the very path of the sun's chariot and sprinkled with its dewy dust."
Williams College stands just under the shadow of Greylock in the Williamstown
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