and the ox, but sometimes ride the horse wild, and chase the buffalo.” The only relics that interest him are Indian relics. One of his regular spring recreations or occupations is the hunting of arrow-heads. He goes looking for arrow-heads as other people go berrying or botanizing. In his published journal he makes a long entry under date of March 28, 1859, about his pursuit of arrow-heads. “I spend many hours every spring,” he says, “gathering the crop which the melting snow and rain have washed bare. When, at length, some island in the meadow or some sandy field elsewhere has been ploughed, perhaps for rye, in the fall, I take note of it, and do not fail to repair thither as soon as the earth begins to be dry in the spring. If the spot chances never to have been cultivated before, I am the first to gather a crop from it. The farmer little thinks that another reaps a harvest which is the fruit of his toil.” He probably picked up thousands of arrow-heads. He had an eye for them. The Indian in him recognized its own. His genius itself is arrow-like, and typical of the wild weapon he so loved,--hard, flinty, fine-grained, penetrating, winged, a flying shaft, bringing down its game with marvelous sureness. His literary art was to let fly with a kind of quick inspiration; and though his arrows sometimes go wide, yet it is always a pleasure to watch their aerial course. Indeed, Thoreau was a kind of Emersonian or transcendental red man, going about with a pocket-glass and an herbarium, instead of with a bow and a tomahawk. He appears to have been as stoical and indifferent and unsympathetic as a veritable Indian; and how he hunted without trap or gun, and fished without hook or snare! Everywhere the wild drew him. He liked the telegraph because it was a kind of æolian harp; the wind blowing upon it made wild, sweet music. He liked the railroad through his native town, because it was the wildest road he knew of: it only made deep cuts into and through the hills. “On it are no houses nor foot-travellers. The travel on it does not disturb me. The woods are left to hang over it. Though straight, it is wild in its accompaniments, keeping all its raw edges. Even the laborers on it are not like other laborers.” One day he passed a little boy in the street who had on a home-made cap of woodchuck’s skin, and it completely filled his eye. He makes a delightful note about it in his journal. That was the kind of cap to have,--“a perfect little idyl, as they say.” Any wild trait unexpectedly cropping out in any of the domestic animals pleased him immensely. The crab-apple was his favorite apple, because of its beauty and perfume. He perhaps never tried to ride a wild horse, but such an exploit was in keeping with his genius.