I would have liked to visit Thoreau’s hut: nothing in our past interests me more. The Gettysburg address perhaps, but it was a big crowd and I would get tired waiting. The tea party in Boston sounds like an escapade that became big news; but the hut—that I would like to have seen, with a tape measure to verify the figures in Walden , and check up on other details—not to put down Henry David but simply to see what the distance was between the facts and his fancy. He had such a large fancy.