Walking through thk woods outside Concord, Massachusetts, in the spring of 1846, amid his solitary experiment in living close to nature, Henry David Thoreau was driven by a sudden storm to find shelter in what he thought was an uninhabited hut. “But therein,” Thoreau recounts in Walden, he found living “John Field, an Irishman, and his wife, and several children,” and he sat with them “under that part of the roof which leaked the least, while it showered and thundered without.”

Thoreau pitied this “honest, hard-working, but shiftless man,” a laborer probably drawn to the area to lay track for the railroad and now reduced to clearing bogs for a local farmer. He also “purposely talked to him as if he were a philosopher, or desired to be one.” “But alas,” Thoreau lamented, “the culture of an Irishman is an enterprise to be undertaken with a sort of moral bog hoe.”

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