I am glad to find that our New England life has a genuine humane core to it

December 26. 

P. M. — To Jenny Dugan’s. 

I walk over the meadow above railroad bridge, where the withered grass rises above the ice, the river being low. I notice that water has oozed out over the edge of this ice or next the meadow’s edge on the west, not having come from the river but evidently from springs in the bank. This thin water is turned to a slush of crystals as thick as mortar nearly, and will soon be solid ice. 

Call at a farmer’s this Sunday afternoon, where I surprise the well-to-do masters of the house lounging in very ragged clothes (for which they think it necessary to apologize), and one of them is busy laying the supper table (at which he invites me to sit down at last), bringing up cold meat from the cellar and a lump of butter on the end of his knife, and making the tea by the time his mother gets home from church. 

Thus sincere and homely, as I am glad to know, is the actual life of these New England men, wearing rags indoors there which would disgrace a beggar (and are not beggars and paupers they who could be disgraced so?) and doing the indispensable work, however humble. How much better and more humane it was than if they had imported and set up among their Penates a headless torso from the ruins of Ireland! 

I am glad to find that our New England life has a genuine humane core to it; that inside, after all, there is so little pretense and brag. Better than that, methinks, is the hard drinking and quarrelling which we must allow is not uncommon there. The middle-aged son sits there in the old unpainted house in a ragged coat, and helps his old mother about her work when the field does not demand him.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 26, 1858