roposition has been reversed, and each visitor takes a
stone away, which reveals not a reversal in the sentiment toward the
memory of Thoreau, but a change in the quality of the Concord pilgrim.

* * * * *

Thoreau's early death was the direct result of his reckless lack of
common prudence. That which made him live, in a literary way, curtailed
his years. The man was improperly and imperfectly nourished, physically.
Men who live alone do not cook any more than they have to: men and
women, both, cook for emulation. That is to say, we work for each other,
and we succeed only as we help each other.

Thoreau was such a pronounced individualist that he cared for no one but
himself, and he cared for himself not at all. It is wife, children and
home that teach a man prudence, and make him bank against the storm. "At
Walden no one bothered me but the State," said Thoreau. If Thoreau had
had a family and treated his household as he treated himself, that
scorned thing, the State, would have stepped in and sent him to the
workhouse, and his children to the Home for the Friendless.

If he had treated dumb animals as he treated himself, the Society for
the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals would have interfered. The absence
of social ties and of all responsibilities fixed in his peculiar
temperament an indifference to hunger, heat, cold, wet, damp, and all
bodily discomfort that classes the man with the flagellants. He tells of
whole days when he ate nothing but berries and drank only cold water;
and at other times of how he walked all day in a soaking rain and went
to bed at night, supperless, under a pine-tree. Emerson records the fact
that on long tramps Thoreau would carry only a chunk of plum-cake for
food, because it was rich and contained condensed nutriment.

The question is sometimes asked, "How can one eat his cake and keep it
too?" but this does not refer to plum-cake.

A few years of plum-cake, cold mince-pie and continual wet feet will put
the petard under even the stoutest constitution.

During his shanty-life Thoreau was imperfectly nourished, and for the
victim of malassimilation, tuberculosis hunts and needs no spyglass.

It is absurd for a man to make a god of his digestive apparatus, but it
is just as bad to forget that the belly is as much the gift of God as
the brain.

In childhood, Thoreau was frail and weak. Outdoor life gradually
developed on his slight frame a splendid