Thoreau writes in his journal:
Here have been three ultra-reformers, lecturers on Slavery, Temperance, the Church, etc., in and about our house and Mrs. Brooks’s the last three or four days,—A. D. Foss, once a Baptist minister in Hopkinton, N.H.; Loring Moody, a sort of travelling pattern-working chaplain; and H. C. Wright, who shocks old women with his infidel writings. Though Foss was a stranger to the others, you would have thought them old and familiar cronies . . .