experiment we tried with success. He could plan a garden, or a house, or a
barn; would have been competent to lead a "Pacific Exploring Expedition";
could give judicious counsel in the gravest private or public affairs.

He lived for the day, not cumbered and mortified by his memory. If he
brought you yesterday a new proposition, he would bring you to-day another
not less revolutionary. A very industrious man, and setting, like all
highly organized men, a high value on his time, he seemed the only man of
leisure in town, always ready for any excursion that promised well, or for
conversation prolonged into late hours. His trenchant sense was never
stopped by his rules of daily prudence, but was always up to the new
occasion. He liked and used the simplest food, yet, when some one urged a
vegetable diet, Thoreau thought all diets a very small matter, saying that
"the man who shoots the buffalo lives better than the man who boards at
the Graham House." He said,--"You can sleep near the railroad, and never
be disturbed: Nature knows very well what sounds are worth attending to,
and has made up her mind not to hear the railroad-whistle. But things
respect the devout mind, and a mental ecstasy was never interrupted." He
noted, what repeatedly befell him, that, after receiving from a distance a
rare plant, he would presently find the same in his own haunts. And those
pieces of luck which happen only to good players happened to him. One day,
walking with a stranger, who inquired where Indian arrow-heads could he
found, he replied, "Everywhere," and, stooping forward, picked one on the
instant from the ground. At Mount Washington, in Tuckerman's Ravine,
Thoreau had a bad fall, and sprained his foot. As he was in the act of
getting up from his fall, he saw for the first time the leaves of the
_Arnica mollis_.

His robust common sense, armed with stout hands, keen perceptions, and
strong will, cannot yet account for the superiority which shone in his