Stalking in the Dark
As I was stalking over the surface of this planet in the dark to-night, I started a plover resting on the ground and heard him go off with whistling wings. My friends wonder that I love to walk alone in solitary fields and woods by night. Sometimes in my loneliest and wildest midnight walk I hear the sound of the whistle and the rattle of the cars, where perchance some of those very friends are being whirled by night over, as they think, a well-known, safe, and public road. I see that men do not make or choose their own paths, whether they are railroads or trackless through the wilds, but what the powers permit each one enjoys My solitary course has the same sanction that the Fitchburg Railroad has. If they have a charter from Massachusetts and - what is of much more importance - from Heaven, to travel the course and in the fashion they do, I have a charter, though it be from Heaven alone, to travel the course I do, to take the necessary lands and pay the damages. It is by the grace of God in both cases. ~ Henry David Thoreau, 1850