e helped, and preface their appeal with the
information that they are resolved, for one thing, never to help
themselves. I require of a visitor that he be not actually starving,
though he may have the very best appetite in the world, however he got
it. Objects of charity are not guests. Men who did not know when their
visit had terminated, though I went about my business again, answering
them from greater and greater remoteness. Men of almost every degree of
wit called on me in the migrating season. Some who had more wits than
they knew what to do with; runaway slaves with plantation manners, who
listened from time to time, like the fox in the fable, as if they heard
the hounds a-baying on their track, and looked at me beseechingly, as
much as to say,--

"O Christian, will you send me back?

One real runaway slave, among the rest, whom I helped to forward toward
the north star. Men of one idea, like a hen with one chicken, and that
a duckling; men of a thousand ideas, and unkempt heads, like those hens
which are made to take charge of a hundred chickens, all in pursuit
of one bug, a score of them lost in every morning's dew--and become
frizzled and mangy in consequence; men of ideas instead of legs, a sort
of intellectual centipede that made you crawl all over. One man proposed
a book in which visitors should write their names, as at the White
Mountains; but, alas! I have too good a memory to make that necessary.

I could not but notice some of the peculiarities of my visitors. Girls
and boys and young women generally seemed glad to be in the woods. They
looked in the pond and at the flowers, and improved their time. Men of
business, even farmers, thought only of solitude and employment, and of
the great distance at which I dwelt from something or other; and though
they said that they loved a ramble in the woods occasionally, it was
obvious that they did not. Restless committed men, whose time was an
taken up in getting a living or keeping it; ministers who spoke of God
as if they enjoyed a monopoly of the subject, who could not bear all
kinds of opinions; doctors, lawyers, uneasy housekeepers who pried
into my cupboard and bed when I was out--how came Mrs.--to know that my
sheets were not as clean as hers?--young men who had ceased to be young,
and had concluded that it was safest to follow the beaten track of the
professions--all these generally said that it was not possible to do so
much good in my pos