Thoreau writes in his journal:
P.M.—Skated to Pantry Brook with C. [William Ellery Channing]. All the tolerable skating was a narrow strip, often only two or three feet wide, between the frozen spew and broken ice of the middle.
The Nantucket Inquirer reported on 1 January 1855:
Notwithstanding the damp, uncomfortable weather of Thursday evening, and the muddy streets, a large audience assembled to listen to the man who has rendered himself notorious by living, as his book asserts, in the woods, at an expense of about sixty dollars per year, in order that he might there hold free communion with Nature, and test for himself the happiness of a life without manual labor or conventional restraints.
