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  I hereby acknowledge the receipt of your check for one hundred dollars on account of manuscript sent to you.—As for another title for the Higher Law article, I can think of nothing better than, Life without Principle. The paper on Walking will be ready ere long.

  I shall be happy to have you print 250. copies of Walden on the terms mentioned & will consider this answer as settling the business. I wish to make one alteration in the new edition viz, to leave out from the title the words “Or Life in the Woods.”

Yours truly
H. D. Thoreau
by S. E. Thoreau

  This excitement about Kossuth is not interesting to me, it is so superficial It is only another kind of dancing or of politics. Men are making speeches to him all over the country, but each expresses only the thought, or the want of thought, of the multitude. No man stands on truth. They are merely banded together as usual, one leaning on another and all together on nothing . . . But an individual standing on truth you cannot pass your hand under, for his foundations reach to the centre of the universe. So superficial these men and their doings, it is life on a leaf or a chip which has nothing but air or water beneath. I love to see a man with a tap-root, though it make him difficult to transplant . . .

  Having fastened my boat at the maple, met, on the bank just above, Luke Dodge, whom I met in a boat fishing up that way once or twice last summer and previous years . . .

  Balm-of-Gilead pollen in house to-day; outdoors, say to-morrow, if fair.

  Minott tells me of one Matthias Bowers, a native of Chelmsford and cousin of C. Bowers, a very active fellow, who used to sleep with him and when he found the door locked would climb over tlne roof and come in at the dormer-window . . .

At Clamshell Shore, I see a clam lying up with open valves . . . Coming back, I talk with Witherell at William Wheeler’s landing. He comes pushing Wheeler’s square-ended boat down-stream with a fish-spear. Says he caught a snapping turtle in the river May 1st. He sits on the side of my boat by the shore a little while, talking with me . . .

  After crossing the Arrowhead Fields, we see a woodchuck run along and climb to the top of a wall and sit erect there,—our first . . .

  Looking up through this soft and warm southwest wind, I notice the conspicuous shadow of Middle Conantum Cliff, now at 3 P.M., and elsewhere the shade of a few apple trees,—their trunks and boughs . . .