The refined side of his nature is indicated by an anecdote of his first
few days in camp on the Potomac. A cadet freshly graduated from West
Point was directed by General McDowell to drill the different companies
of the regiment in succession, and having but slight respect for
volunteer soldiers, he gave an emphasis to his orders by the plentiful
use of profane language. When he came to the Concord company, Captain
Prescott, who was standing at one side, walked across to him and said,
"I must request you, Sir, to give your orders in the plain terms of the
military code, for my men do not like profanity. If you do otherwise, I
shall order them to march off the ground; and they will obey me and not
you." This brought the cadet to terms very quickly.

In the spring of 1862 he recruited another company for the Massachusetts
Thirty-second; soon rose to the rank of colonel; and after escaping the
peril of a dozen hard-fought battles, he was finally killed, with nearly
half his command, in Grant's advance upon Richmond. Perhaps no other man
would have been so greatly missed in his native town.

Thoreau used to walk through Concord with the long step of an Indian,
looking straight before him, but at the same time observing everything.
Occasionally he would stop, make an incision in the bark of a tree with
his knife, or pick up a stone and examine it. It was not often that he
was met with in anybody's house, or seen in company with other men.

His profession was that of a surveyor; and it is easy to imagine how,
with his poetic temperament, while laying out roads and measuring
wood-lots, he came to be what he was. Many people thought his peculiar
ways were an affectation, but I believe that he was one of the plainest
and simplest of men; as plain and single-minded as President Lincoln
himself. It was his theory of the way men should live. He was a Diogenes