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always felt myself more a Tuttle than a Walker.”
    â€œDo not let Grandfather hear you say that. He is so proud you followed in his footsteps.”
    â€œIn truth, I do not intend to follow him but to go my own way,” Adam said. “Dr. Silas Walker is of the old school. He still believes in ancient medical theories concerning the body’s humors. If purging doesn’t do the trick, he is ever ready to use his lancet and his leeches.”
    â€œOh, those horrid leeches! The memory of them makes me shiver,” I said.“When I was out of sorts as a child, he would fish them out of the big Staffordshire jar in his office and apply them to my limbs.”
    â€œGran would give me a dose of some bitter herb concoction to cure my ills, and ’twas then I missed my mother most,” Adam said. “Ma always dosed me with honey from her prized hives.”
    It must comfort Adam that when his mother fell off a high tree branch whilst trying to capture a swarm of wild honeybees, she died instantly. When I think of my own dear mother’s drawn-out, painful death from Consumption, my only comfort is the frail but persistent hope that a spirit as fine as hers must continue forth in some other blessed form.
    Adam and I soon left the little burial ground on the shady knoll and joined the others in Granny Tuttle’s kitchen. As she served up gingerbread and chamomile tea, she asked Mr. Thoreau why he had chosen to get himself carted off to jail last month.
    â€œI warrant you weren’t fetched up to be a jailbird,” she said.
    â€œAs the bill, so goes the song; as the bird, such the nest,” he replied.
    Granny narrowed her eyes at him. “What sort of flummydiddle talk is that? I should think your Aunt Maria was mortified.”
    â€œYou know my aunt, Mrs. Tuttle?”
    â€œAs a girl I was pretty budge with her. And I know all the Thoreaus to be a fine, honest race. ’Tis no wonder then that I was flabbergasted when I heard one of ’em got hisself arrested.”
    â€œI preferred that to paying my poll tax,” he said.
    â€œLook-a-here, son. ’Tis every freeborn man’s duty to pay his taxes. How else can this Great Democracy function?”
    â€œNow, Gran, don’t get all brustled up about it,” Adam said, falling into her way of speaking as he rocked in the splint-bottomed chair his Grandfather Tuttle had made. “Henry surely had good reasons for refusing to pay the tax.”
    Granny gave one of her sniffs. “I can think of nary a one.”
    â€œAllow me to give you mine, ma’am,” Thoreau said, courteous as can be. “I was protesting the Mexican War. I will not pay a penny to support an immoral war designed to spread slavery.”
    â€œI don’t countenance slavery,” she muttered and changed the subject. “Anyways, I hear tell you are now residing in a shanty by some piddling pond, young man.”
    â€œCall it a shanty if you like, Mrs. Tuttle, but I live in a good plastered and shingled house entirely of my own building.”
    â€œWell, I should think you would feel mighty lonesome in it.”
    â€œNo more lonely than a loon, ma’am. Nature keeps me company. It is the perennial source of life, is it not?”
    â€œWhat are you, a hermit?” Granny countered.
    â€œI think that I love society as much as most,” Henry replied, but his smile was most ironic.
    â€œSo what do you do all day?” Granny persisted. “Anything useful? ”
    â€œI support myself well enough by the labor of my hands.”
    â€œI wager yer family made sacrifices to get you a fine Hah-vahd education, young man. What good is it doin’ you?”
    â€œI still have the leisure for literary pursuits and the study of nature,” he answered. “If a man must have money—and he needs but the smallest amount—the true and independent way to earn it is by day labor. There is no good