HENRY D. THOBEAU 29 



the house of mourning, I hear a cockerel crow, far 

 or near, I think to myself, ' There is one of us well 

 at any rate, ' and with a sudden gush return to my 

 senses." 



Thoreau pitched his " Walden " in this key ; he 

 claps his wings and gives forth a clear, saucy, 

 cheery, triumphant note, — if only to wake his 

 neighbors up. And the hook is certainly the most 

 delicious piece of brag in literature. There is no- 

 thing else like it; nothing so good, certainly. It 

 is a challenge and a triumph, and has a morning 

 freshness and elan. Kead the chapter on his 

 "bean-field." One wants to go forthwith and plant 

 a field with beans, and hoe them barefoot. It is 

 a kind of celestial agriculture. "When my hoe 

 tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to the 

 woods and the sky, and was an accompaniment to 

 my labor which yielded an instant and immeasur- 

 able crop. It was no longer beans that I hoed, nor 

 I that hoed beans; and I remembered with as much 

 pity as pride, if I remembered at all, my acquaint- 

 ances who had gone to the city to attend the ora- 

 torios." "On gala days the town fires its great 

 guns, which echo like pop-guns to these woods, 

 and some waif of martial music occasionally pene- 

 trated thus far. To me, away there in my bean- 

 field and the other end of the town, the big guns 

 sounded as if a puff-ball had burst; and when there 

 was a military turn-out of which I was ignorant, I 

 have sometimes had a vague sense all day, — of 

 some sort of itching and disease in the horizon, as 



