74 PA RT O N E
farm lane and wrestle with a hickory sapling “to get into my old sinews some
of its elastic fibre and clear sap.”
One August day, Walt makes his way to a secluded dell “fill’d with bushes,
trees, grass, a group of willows, a straggling bank, and a spring of delicious wa-
ter running right through the middle of it, with two or three little cascades.”
A light south-west wind was blowing through the tree-tops. It was just the
place and time for my Adamic air-bath and flesh-brushing from head to foot.
So hanging clothes on a rail near by, keeping old broadbrim straw on head and
easy shoes on feet, havn’t I had a good time the last two hours! First with the
stiff-elastic bristles rasping arms, breast, sides, till they turn’d scarlet—then
partially bathing in the clear waters of the running brook... stepping about
barefooted every few minutes now and then in some neighbouring black ooze,
for unctuous mud-bath to my feet...
As I walk’d slowly over the grass, the sun shone out enough to show the
shadow moving with me. Somehow I seem’d to get identity with each and
every thing around me, in its condition. Nature was naked, and I was also.