It galls me to listen to the remarks of craven-hearted neighbors who speak disparagingly of Brown because he resorted to violence, resisted the government, threw his life away! . . . C. [William Ellery Channing] says that he saw a loon at Walden the 15th . . .

  The book came duly to hand, and as it was not for me, I intend to send you the money for it in this note—

  Blake [H.G.O. Blake] must speak for himself and not for me when speaking of that mountain walk of ours. I enjoyed it well enough, and ought to be ashamed of myself that I did, perhaps, since it yielded me so little.

  Our Cape Cod walk salts down better with me, & yet there wasn’t much salt in that,—enough to save it perhaps, but not enough of the sea & sand & sky. The good things I got in it were rather incidental—did not belong to the sea, But I did get some glimpses of the sea. I remember a smoke we had on a little barren knoll where we heard the plover, in North Dennis, in the twilight after a long & hot days walk. We heard the pounding of the surf against a shore twenty miles off (so said the man at whose house we passed the night,—) and we were expecting to arrive there the next day.

  I have been in the habit of thinking our journey culminated in that smoke, if it did’nt end there, for, though we arrived at the beach the next day according to programme & found the thirty miles stretch of it, with its accompaniments too large to complain of, yet—our anticipations were immense. But now in thinking of it the actual sea & sky loom up larger, while our smoke & dreams—hold their own pretty well—

Your friend
Theo Brown