on her marriage to the Rev. William
Emerson. She was grandmother of Waldo Emerson. Her second
husband was the Rev. Dr. Ripley.

I knew Henry Thoreau very intimately. I went to school with
him when I was a little boy and he was a big one. Afterward
I was a scholar in his school.

He was very fond of small boys, and used to take them out
with him in his boat, and make bows and arrows for them, and
take part in their games. He liked also to get a number of
the little chaps of a Saturday afternoon and take them out
in his boat, or for a long walk in the woods.

He knew the best places to find huckleberries and blackberries
and chestnuts and lilies and cardinal and other rare flowers.
We used to call him Trainer Thoreau, because the boys called
the soldiers the "trainers," and he had a long, measured stride
and an erect carriage which made him seem something like a
soldier, although he was short and rather ungainly in figure.
He had a curved nose which reminded one a little of the beak
of a parrot.

His real name was David Henry Thoreau, although he changed
the order of his first two names afterward. He was a great
finder of Indian arrow-heads, spear-heads, pestles, and other
stone implements which the Indians had left behind them, of
which there was great abundance in the Concord fields and
meadows.

He knew the rare forest birds and all the ways of birds and
wild animals. Naturalists commonly know birds and beasts
and wild flowers as a surgeon who has dissected the human
body, or perhaps sometimes a painter who has made pictures
of them knows men and women. But he knew birds and beasts
as one boy knows another--all their delightful little habits
and fashions. He had the most wonderful good fortune. We
used to say that if anything happened in the deep woods which
only came about once in a hundred years, Henry Thoreau would
be sure to be on the spot at the time and know the whole story.

It seemed that Nature could not raise
A plant in any secret place,
In quaking bog or snowy hill,
Beneath the grass that shades the rill,
Under the snow, between the rocks,
In damp fields known to bird and fox,
But he would come in the very hour
It opened in its virgin bower,
As if a sunbeam showed the place,
And tell its long-descended race.
It seemed as if the breezes brought him;
It seemed as if the sparrows taught him;
As if by secret sight he knew
Where, in the far fields, the orchis