《瓦尔登湖·第十四章·旧居民、冬天的访客·Former Inhabitants and Winter Visitors》第5节
The last inhabitant of these woods before me was an Irishman, Hugh Quoil (if I have spelt his name with coil enough,) who occupied Wyman’s tenement,—Col. Quoil, he was called. Rumor said that he had been a soldier at Waterloo. If he had lived I should have made him fight his battles over again. His trade here was that of a ditcher. Napoleon went to St. Helena; Quoil came to Walden Woods. All I know of him is tragic. He was a man of manners, like one who had seen the world, and was capable of more civil speech than you could well attend to. He wore a great coat in mid-summer, being affected with the trembling delirium, and his face was the color of carmine. He died in the road at the foot of Brister’s Hill shortly after I came to the woods, so that I have not remembered him as a neighbor. Before his house was pulled down, when his comrades avoided it as “an unlucky castle,” I visited it. There lay his old clothes curled up by use, as if they were himself, upon his raised plank bed. His pipe lay broken on the hearth, instead of a bowl broken at the fountain. The last could never have been the symbol of his death, for he confessed to me that, though he had heard of Brister’s Spring, he had never seen it; and soiled cards, kings of diamonds spades and hearts, were scattered over the floor. One black chicken which the administrator could not catch, black as night and as silent, not even croaking, awaiting Reynard, still went to roost in the next apartment. In the rear there was the dim outline of a garden, which had been planted but had never received its first hoeing, owing to those terrible shaking fits, though it was now harvest time. It was over-run with Roman wormwood and beggar-ticks, which last stuck to my clothes for all fruit. The skin of a woodchuck was freshly stretched upon the back of the house, a trophy of his last Waterloo; but no warm cap or mittens would he want more.
注释摘要
梭罗在这一段里安置了瓦尔登林间最后一位旧居民——爱尔兰人休·奎尔。上一段刚讲完制陶人怀曼，那是上一代的新英格兰白人拓殖者；而奎尔则是更靠近梭罗时代的闯入者，他住在怀曼留下的破屋里，连名字都带着作者的揶揄：括号里那句“如果我把他的名字拼得够纠缠”，把 Quoil 和 coil（缠绕、混乱）玩了个文字游戏。他被称作“科尔上校”，流言里是滑铁卢的老兵，这个过去的…