freedom and
wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil, to
regard man as an inhabitant, a part and parcel of nature, rather than
as a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement; if so, I
may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of
civilization. The minister and the school committees, and every one of
you, will take care of that."

To Thoreau's admirers, he is the prophet of the fields and woods, the
interpreter of nature, and his every word has to them the deepest
significance. He is the man who

"Lives all alone, close to the bone,
And where life is sweetest, constantly eatest."

They resent all criticism of his life or his words. They are impatient
of all analysis of his methods or of his motives, and a word of praise
of him is the surest passport to their good graces.

But the critics sometimes miss the inner harmony which Thoreau's
admirers see, and discern only queer paradoxes and extravagances of
statement where the others hear the voice of nature's oracle. With
most literary men, the power or disposition of those who know or
understand their writings is in some degree a matter of literary
culture. It is hardly so in the case of Thoreau.

The most illiterate man I know who had ever heard of Thoreau, Mr.
Barney Mullins, of Freedom Centre, Outagamie County, Wisconsin, was a
most ardent admirer of Thoreau, while the most eminent critic in
America, James Russell Lowell, does him scant justice. To Lowell, the
finest thoughts of Thoreau are but strawberries from Emerson's garden,
and other critics have followed back these same strawberries through
Emerson's to still older gardens, among them to that of Sir Thomas
Browne.

But, setting the critics aside, let me tell you about Barney Mullins.
Twenty years ago, I lived for a year in the northern part of Wisconsin.
The snow is very deep in the winter there, and once I rode into town
through the snowbanks on a sled drawn by two oxen and driven by Barney
Mullins. Barney was born on the banks of Killarney, and he could
scarcely be said to speak the English language. He told me that before
he came to Freedom Centre he had lived in a town called Concord, in
Massachusetts. I asked him if he had happened to know a man there by
the name of Henry Thoreau. He at once grew enthusiastic and he said,
among other things: "Mr. Thoreau was a land-surveyor in Concord. I
knew him well. He had a way of his own, and he d