Thoreau writes in his journal:
I think it must be the white lily root I find gnawed by the rats, though the leaves are pellucid. It has large roots with eyes and many smaller rootlets attached . . .
If there is any one with whom we have a quarrel, it is most likely that that one makes some just demand on us which we disappoint.
Thoreau also writes to Francis H. Underwood:
If you will inform me in season at what rate per page, (describing the page) you will pay for accepted articles,—returning the rejected within a reasonable time—and your terms are satisfactory, I will forward something for your Magazine before Dec 5th, and you shall be at liberty to put my name in the list of contributors.
Yours
Henry D. Thoreau.
“In the summer and fall of 1853, Underwood wrote to numerous literary men of New England in an attempt to round up literary material for a projected antislavery magazine to be issued by the Boston publisher John P. Jewett. Jewett had already made his name and had begun to make his fabulous profits the year before out of one item, Mrs. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
