ABSTRACT
On page 144 of the tattered Bantam Classics edition of Walden that has traveled with me ever since my high school days in the late 1960s, Henry David Thoreau remarks: “We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.”
