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find the following curious entries, in Thoreau's journal for April 3, 1856:

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"People are talking about my uncle Charles. George Minott [a sort of cousin of the Thoreaus] tells how he heard Tilly Brown once asking him to show him a peculiar inside lock in wrestling. Now, don't hurt me, don't throw me hard.' He struck his antagonist inside his knees with his feet, and so deprived him of his legs. Edmund Hosmer remembers his tricks in the bar-room, shuffling cards, etc.; he could do anything with cards, yet he did not gamble. He would toss up his hat, twirling it over and over, and catch it on his head invariably. He once wanted to live at Hosmer's, but the latter was afraid of him. Can't we study up something?' he asked. Hosmer asked him into the house, and brought out apples and cider, and uncle Charles talked. 'You!' said he, I burst the bully of Haverhill.' He wanted to wrestle, would not be put off. Well, we won't wrestle in the house.' So they went out to the yard, and a crowd got round. Come, spread some straw here,' said uncle Charles, I don't want to hurt him.' He threw him at once. They tried again; he told them to spread more straw, and he 'burst' him. Uncle Charles used to say that he had n't a single tooth in his head. The fact

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was they were all double, and I have heard that he lost about all of them by the time he was since I knew him he could He had a strong head, and would drink gin sometimes, Did not use tobacco, except

twenty-one. Ever swallow his nose. never got drunk; but not to excess.

snuff out of another's box, sometimes; was very neat in his person; was not profane, though vulgar."

This was the uncle who, as Thoreau said in "Walden," "goes to sleep shaving himself, and is obliged to sprout potatoes in a cellar Sundays in order to keep awake and keep the Sabbath." He was a humorous, ne'er-do-weel character, who, with a little property, no family, and no special regard for his reputation, used to move about from place to place, a privileged jester, athlete, and unprofessional juggler. One of his tricks was to swallow all the knives and forks and some of the plates at the tavern table, and then offer to restore them if the landlord would forgive him the bill. I remember this worthy in his old age, an amusing guest at his brother-in-law's table, where his nephew plied him with questions. We shall find him mentioned again, in con

nection with Daniel Webster's friendship for the Dunbar family.

Thoreau's mother had this same incessant and rather malicious liveliness that in Charles Dunbar took the grotesque form above hinted at. She was a kindly, shrewd woman, with traditions of gentility and sentiments of generosity, but with sharp and sudden flashes of gossip and malice, which never quite amounted to ill-nature, but greatly provoked the prim and commonplace respectability that she so often came in contact with. Along with this humorous. quality there went also an affectionate earnestness in her relation with those who depended on her, that could not fail to be respected by all who knew the hard conditions that New England life, even in a favored village like Concord, then imposed on the mother of a family, where the outward circumstances were not in keeping with the inward aspiration.

"Who sings the praise of woman in our clime?

I do not boast her beauty or her grace:

Some humble duties render her sublime,
She, the sweet nurse of this New England race,
The flower upon the country's sterile face;
The mother of New England's sons, the pride
Of every house where those good sons abide."

Her husband was a grave and silent, but inwardly cheerful and social person, who' found no difficulty in giving his wife the lead in all affairs. The small estate he inherited from his father, the first John Thoreau, was lost in trade, or by some youthful indiscretions, of which he had his quiet share; and he then, about 1823, turned his attention to pencil-making, which had by that time become a lucrative business in Concord. He had married in 1812, and he died in 1859. He was a small, deaf, and, unobtrusive man, plainly clad, and "minding his own business; very much in contrast with his wife, who was one of the most unceasing talkers ever seen in Concord. Her gift in speech was proverbial, and wherever she was the conversation fell

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largely to her share. She fully verified the Oriental legend, which accounts for the greater loquacity of women by the fact that nine baskets of talk were let down from heaven to Adam and Eve in their garden, and that Eve glided forward first and secured six of them. Old Dr. Ripley, a few years before his death, wrote a letter to his son, towards the end of which he said, with

courteous reticence, "I meant to have filled a page with sentiments. But a kind neighbor, Mrs. Thoreau, has been here more than an hour. This letter must go in the mail to-day." Her conversation generally put a stop to other occupations; and when at her table Henry Thoreau's grave talk with oth ers was interrupted by this flow of speech at the other end of the board, he would pause, and wait with entire and courteous. silence, until the interruption ceased, and then take up the thread of his own discourse where he had dropped it; bowing to his mother, but without a word of cominent on what she had said.

Dr. Ripley was the minister of Concord for half a century, and in his copious manuscripts, still preserved, are records concerning his parishioners of every conceivable kind. He carefully kept even the smallest scrap that he ever wrote, and among his papers I once found a fragment, on one side of which was written a pious meditation, and on the other a certificate to this effect: "Understanding that Mr. John Thoreau, now of Chelmsford, is going into business in that place, and is about to apply for license to

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