who offered him his carriage in a shower, "But where will _you_ ride,
then?"--and what accusing silences, and what searching and irresistible
speeches, battering down all defences, his companions can remember!

Mr. Thoreau dedicated his genius with such entire love to the fields,
hills, and waters of his native town, that he made them known and
interesting to all reading Americans, and to people over the sea.
The river on whose banks he was born and died he knew from its springs to
its confluence with the Merrimack. He had made summer and winter
observations on it for many years, and at every hour of the day and the
night. The result of the recent survey of the Water Commissioners
appointed by the State of Massachusetts he had reached by his private
experiments, several years earlier. Every fact which occurs in the bed,
on the banks, or in the air over it; the fishes, and their spawning and
nests, their manners, their food; the shad-flies which fill the air on a
certain evening once a year, and which are snapped at by the fishes so
ravenously that many of these die of repletion; the conical heaps of small
stones on the river-shallows, one of which heaps will sometimes overfill a
cart,--these heaps the huge nests of small fishes; the birds which
frequent the stream, heron, duck, sheldrake, loon, osprey; the snake,
musk-rat, otter, woodchuck, and fox, on the banks; the turtle, frog, hyla,
and cricket, which make the banks vocal,--were all known to him, and, as
it were, townsmen and fellow-creatures; so that he felt an absurdity or
violence in any narrative of one of these by itself apart, and still more
of its dimensions on an inch-rule, or in the exhibition of its skeleton,
or the specimen of a squirrel or a bird in brandy. He liked to speak of
the manners of the river, as itself a lawful creature, yet with exactness,
and always to an observed fact. As he knew the river, so the ponds in this
region.