Lectured in basement (vestry) of the orthodox church, and I trust helped to undermine it.

December  18. 

12 m. Start for Amherst, N. H. 

A very cold day. Thermometer at 8 a. m. — 8° (and I hear of others very much lower at an earlier hour), -2° at 11.45. 

I find the first snow enough to whiten the ground beyond Littleton, and it deepens all the way to Amherst. The steam of the engine hugs the earth very close. Is it because it [is] a very clear, cold day? 

The last half the route from Groton Junction to Nashua is along the Nashua River mostly. This river looks less interesting than the Concord. It appears even more open, i. e. less wooded (?). At any rate the banks are more uniform, and I notice none of our meadows on it. 

At Nashua, hire a horse and sleigh, and ride to Amherst, eleven miles, against a strong northwest wind, this bitter cold afternoon. When I get to South Merrimack, about 3.15 p. m., they tell me the thermometer is —3°. While the driving hand is getting benumbed, I am trying to warm the other against my body under the buffalo. 

Warm myself there in the shop of a tub and pail maker, who does his work by hand, splitting out the staves with a curved knife and smoothing them with curved shaves. His hoops are white ash, shaved thin. 

After entering Amherst territory, near the Souhegan, notice many shagbark trees, which they tell me the owners value as they do a good apple tree, getting a dozen bushels of shelled nuts sometimes from a tree. I see the nuts on some still. 

At my lecture, the audience attended to me closely, and I was satisfied; that is all I ask or expect generally. Not one spoke to me afterward, nor needed they. I have no doubt that they liked it, in the main, though few of them would have dared say so, provided they were conscious of it. 

Generally, if I can only get the ears of an audience, I do not care whether they say they like my lecture or not. I think I know as well as they can tell. At any rate, it is none of my business, and it would be impertinent for me to inquire. 

The stupidity of most of these country towns, not to include the cities, is in its innocence infantile. Lectured in basement (vestry) of the orthodox church, and I trust helped to undermine it. 

I was told to stop at the U. S. Hotel, but an old inhabitant had never heard of it and could not tell me where to find it, but I found the letters on a sign with out help. It was the ordinary unpretending (?) desolate-looking country tavern. The landlord apologized to me because there was to be a ball there that night which would keep me awake, and it did. He and others there, horrible to relate, were in the habit of blowing their noses with their fingers and wiping them on their boots! Champney's U. S. Hotel was an ordinary team tavern, and the letters U. S., properly enough, not very conspicuous on the sign. 

A paper called the Farmer's Cabinet is published there. It has reached its fifty-fifth volume.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 18, 1856


At my lecture. See Thoreau's Lectures after Walden, Lecture 54. HDT read his paper “Walking or the Wild,”  which had first been delivered at the Concord Lyceum on April 23, 1851. The lecture began  with a reference to a Wordsworth poem :

Wordsworth on a pedestrian tour through Scotland, was one evening just as the sun was setting with an usual splendor, greeted by a woman of the country with the words “What, are you stepping westward?" And he says that such was the originality of the salutation, combined with the association of the hour and place that 

"stepping westward seem to be 

a kind of heavenly destiny.”

The sentences from my journal which I am going to read this evening, for want of a better rallying cry may accept these words "stepping westward.” 

See Walking (1861) ( "Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a West as distant and as fair as that into which the sun goes down He appears to migrate westward daily and tempt us to follow him He is the Great Western Pioneer whom the nations follow We dream all night of those mountain ridges in the horizon though they may be of vapor only which were last gilded by his rays . . . The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild and what I have been preparing to say is that in Wildness is the preservation of the World .")

See also January 11, 1857 ("For some years past I have partially offered myself as a lecturer; have been advertised as such several years. Yet I have had but two or three invitations to lecture in a year, and some years none at all. I congratulate myself on having been permitted to stay at home thus, I am so much richer for it. I do not see what I should have got of much value, but money, by going about, but I do see what I should have lost. It seems to me that I have a longer and more liberal lease of life thus. I cannot afford to be telling my experience, especially to those who perhaps will take no interest in it. I wish to be getting experience.")