Office with his mail, like any ordinary citizen. The petty
constraint, the narrow standards of conduct which are sometimes the bane
of village life were almost unknown. Transcendental freedom of
speculation, all manner of heterodoxies, and the individual queernesses
of those whom the world calls "cranks," had produced a general
tolerance. Thus it was said, that the only reason why services were held
in the Unitarian Church on Sunday was because Judge Hoar didn't quite
like to play whist on that day. Many of the Concord houses have gardens
bordering upon the river; and I was interested to notice that the boats
moored at the bank had painted on their sterns plant names or bird
names taken from the Concord poems--such as "The Rhodora," "The Veery,"
"The Linnaea," and "The Wood Thrush." Many a summer hour I spent with
Edward Hoar in his skiff, rowing, or sailing, or floating up and down on
this soft Concord stream--Musketaquit, or "grass-ground river"--moving
through miles of meadow, fringed with willows and button bushes, with a
current so languid, said Hawthorne, that the eye cannot detect which way
it flows. Sometimes we sailed as far as Fair Haven Bay, whose "dark and
sober billows," "when the wind blows freshly on a raw March day,"
Thoreau thought as fine as anything on Lake Huron or the northwest
coast. Nor were we, I hope, altogether unperceiving of that other river
which Emerson detected flowing underneath the Concord--

Thy summer voice, Musketaquit,
Repeats the music of the rain,
But sweeter rivers pulsing flit
Through thee as though through Concord plain....

I see the inundation sweet,
I hear the spending of the stream,
Through years, through men, through nature fleet,
Through love and thought, through power and dream.

Edward Hoar had been Thoreau's companion in one of his visits to the
Maine woods. He knew the flora and fauna of Concord as well as his
friend the poet-naturalist. He had a large experience of the world, had
run a ranch in New Mexico and an orange plantation in Sicily. He was not
so well known to the public as his brothers, Rockwood Hoar, Attorney
General in Grant's Cabinet, and the late Senator George Frisbie Hoar, of
Worcester; but I am persuaded that he was just as good company; and,
then, neither of these distinguished gentlemen would have wasted whole
afternoons in eating the lotus along the quiet reaches of the
Musketaquit with a stri