18 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF THOREAU. 



the gentleman who offered him his carriage in a 

 shower, &quot; But where will you ride, then ? &quot; and 

 what accusing silences, and what searching and ir 

 resistible speeches, battering down all defences, his 

 companions can remember. 



Mr. Thoreau dedicated his genius with such entire 

 love to the fields, hills, and waters of his native town, 

 that he made them known and interesting to all read 

 ing Americans, and to people over the sea. The river 

 on whose banks he was born and died he knew from 

 its springs to its confluence with the Merrimack. He 

 had made summer and winter observations on it for 

 many years, and at every hour of the day and night. 

 The result of the recent survey of the Water Com 

 missioners appointed by the State of Massachusetts 

 he had reached by his private experiments, several 

 years earlier. Every fact which occurs in the bed, on 

 the banks, or in the air over it; the fishes, and their 

 spawning and nests, their manners, their food; the 

 shad-flies which fill the air on a certain evening once 

 a year, and which are snapped at by the fishes so 

 ravenously that many of these die of repletion ; the 

 conical heaps of small stones on the river-shallows, 

 one of which heaps will sometimes overfill a cart, 

 these heaps the huge nests of small fishes ; the birds 

 which frequent the stream, heron, duck, sheldrake, 

 loon, osprey ; the snake, musk-rat, otter, woodchuck, 

 and fox, on the banks ; the turtle, frog, hyla, and 

 cricket, which make the banks vocal, were well 

 known to him, and, as it were, townsmen and fellow- 

 creatures ; so that he felt an absurdity or violence in 

 any narrative of one of these by itself apart, and still 

 more of its dimensions on an inch-rule, or in the exhi 

 bition of its skeleton, or the specimen of a squirrel or 



