He always invited his favorites to walk with him, and I once had the honor of climbing a very high hill by his side, in time to look at a Concord sunset, which I myself realized was the finest in the world. Another peculiar spirit now and then haunted us, usually sad as a pine-tree--Thoreau. His enormous eyes, tame with religious intellect and wild with the loose rein, making a steady flash in this strange unison of forces, frightened me dreadfully at first. The unanswerable argument which he unwittingly made to soften my heart towards him was to fall desperately ill. During his long illness my mother lent him our sweet old music-box, to which she had danced as it warbled at the Old Manse, in the first year of her marriage, and which now softly dreamed forth its tunes in a time-mellowed tone. When he died, it seemed as if an anemone, more lovely than any other, had been carried from the borders of a wood into its silent depths, and dropped, in solitude and shadow, among the recluse ferns and mosses which are so seldom disturbed by passing feet. Son of freedom and opportunity that he was, he touched the heart by going to nature's peacefulness like the saints, and girding upon his American sovereignty the hair-shirt of service to self-denial. He was happy in his intense discipline of the flesh, as all men are when they have once tasted power--if it is the power which awakens perception of the highest concerns. His countenance had an April pensiveness about it; you would never have guessed that he could write of owls so jocosely. His manner was such as to suggest that he could mope and weep with them. I never crossed an airy hill or broad field in Concord, without thinking of him who had been the companion of space as well as of delicacy; the lover of the wood-thrush, as well as of the Indian. Walden woods rustled the name of Thoreau whenever we walked in them. When we drove from the station to The Wayside, in arriving from Europe, on a hot summer day, I distinctly remember the ugliness of the un-English landscape and the forlornness of the little cottage which was to be our home. Melancholy and stupid days immediately followed (at least they were so in my estimation). I marveled at the amount of sand in the flower-borders and at the horrifying delinquencies of our single servant. For some years I was eager to use all the eloquence I could muster in my epistles to girl friends, in England or anywhere, as to the paucity of life in Concord. Perhaps the following extracts from two letters, one written at Bath, England, and the other at Concord, and never sent, but kept by my mother from the flames with many more of my expressions in correspondence, may convey the feelings of the whole family:-- 31 CHARLES STREET, BATH, ENGLAND.