His protestations, characteristically unqualified and emphatic, imply that thoughts of travel have beset him. Probably they beset every outdoor philosopher at this short-day season. They are part of the autumnal crop. Our northern world begins to look--in cloudy moods--like a place to escape from. The birds have gone, the leaves have fallen, the year is done. “Let us arise and go also,” an inward voice seems to whisper. Not unlikely there is in us all the dormant remainder of an outworn migratory instinct. Civilization has caged us and tamed us; “hungry generations” have trodden us down; but below consciousness and memory there still persists the blind stirring of ancestral impulse. The fathers were nomads, and the children’s feet are still not quite content with day’s work in a treadmill. Let our preferences be what they may, however, the greater number of us must stay where we are put, and play the hand that is dealt to us, happy if we can face the dark side of the year with a measure of philosophy. If there is a new self, as Thoreau says, there will be a new world and a new season. If we carry the tropics within us, we need not dream of Florida. And even if there is no constraint upon our going and coming, we need not be in haste to run away. We may safely wait a week or two, at least. November is often not half so bad as it is painted--not half so bad, indeed, as Thoreau himself sometimes painted it. For the eleventh month was not one of his favorites. “November Eat-Heart,” he is more than once moved to call it. The experience of it puts his equanimity to the proof. Even his bravest words about it sound rather like a defiance than a welcome,--a little as if he were whistling to keep up his courage. With the month at its worst, he confesses, he has almost to drive himself afield. He can hardly decide upon any route; “all seem so unpromising, mere surface-walking and fronting the cold wind.” “Surface-walking.” How excellent that is! Every contemplative outdoor man knows what is meant, but only Thoreau could have hit it off to such perfection in a word. I must admit that I am not sorry to find the Walden stoic once in a long while overtaken by such a comparatively unheroic mood. He boasted so often and so well (with all the rest he boasted of his boasting) that it pleases me to hear him complain. So the weather could be too much even for him, I say to myself, with something like a chuckle. He was mortal, after all; and the day was sometimes dark, even in Concord.