Curios and Oddities

Oct. 20, 1857

            [While out on a walk HDT encounters Brooks Clark, an eighty year-old man, walking barefoot (because his shoes are full of wild apples he picked in the woods).]  It pleased me to see this cheery old man, with such a feeble hold on life, bent almost double, thus enjoying the evening of his days.  Far be it from me to call it avarice [greed] or penury [poverty], this childlike delight in finding something in the woods or fields and carrying it home in the October evening.  Oh, no; he was happy to be Nature’s pensioner still, and birdlike to pick up his living.