FORMER INHABITANTS. 
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sufferance while they lived; and there often the sheriff 
came in vain to collect the taxes, and 66 attached a chip,” 
for form’s sake, as I have read in his accounts, there 
being nothing else that he could lay his hands on. One 
day in midsummer, when I was hoeing, a man who was 
carrying a load of pottery to market stopped his horse 
against my held and inquired concerning Wyman the 
younger. He had long ago bought a potter’s wheel of 
him, and wished to know what had become of him. I 
had read of the potter’s clay and wheel in Scripture, 
but it had never occurred to me that the pots we use 
were not such as had come down unbroken from those 
days, or grown on trees like gourds somewhere, and I 
was pleased to hear that so fictile an art was ever prac¬ 
tised in my neighborhood. 
The last inhabitant of these woods before me was 
an Irishman, Hugh Quoil, (if I have spelt his name 
with coil enough,) who occupied Wyman’s tenement, — 
Col. Quoil, he was called. Eumor said that he had been 
a soldier at Waterloo. If he had lived I should have 
made him fight his battles over again. His trade here 
was that of a ditcher. Napoleon went to St. Helena; 
Quoil came to Walden Woods. All I know of him is 
tragic. He was a man of manners, like one who had 
seen the world, and was capable of more civil speech 
than you could well attend to. He wore a great coat in 
mid-summer, being affected with the trembling delirium, 
and his face was the color of carmine. He died in the 
road at the foot of Brister’s Hill shortly after I came to 
the woods, so that I have not remembered him as a 
neighbor. Before his house was pulled down, when his 
comrades avoided it as “ an unlucky castle,” I visited it. 
There lay his old clothes curled up by use, as if they 
