later, came into
touch and I can tell how the figures looked as scanned by the eyes of
a boy.

Thoreau in those days was known in the town as an irregular, eccentric
spirit, rather hopeless for any practical purpose. He could make a
good lead-pencil but having mastered the art he dropped it, preferring
to lead a vagabond life, loitering on the river and in the woods,
rather to the disquietude of the community, though he had a
comfortable home cared for by his good mother and sister. He housed
himself in a wigwam at Walden Pond and was suspected of having started
from the brands of his camp a forest fire which had spread far. This
strange man, rumour said, had written a book no copy of which had ever
been sold. It described a week on the Concord and Merrimac rivers. The
edition fell dead from the press, and all the books, one thousand or
more, he had collected in his mother's house, a queer library of these
unsold books which he used to exhibit to visitors laughing grimly over
his unfortunate venture in the field of letters. My aunt sent me one
day to carry a message to Mrs. Thoreau and my rap on her door was
answered by no other man than this odd son who, on the threshold
received my message. He stood in the doorway with hair which looked as
if it had been dressed with a pine-cone, inattentive grey eyes, hazy
with far-away musings, an emphatic nose and disheveled attire that
bore signs of tramps in woods and swamps. Thinking of the forest fire
I fancied he smelled of smoke and peered curiously up the staircase
behind him hoping I might get a glimpse of that queer library all
of one book duplicated one thousand times. The story went that his
artless mother used to say that Emerson, when he talked, imitated
Henry, and I well recall a certain slow hesitation and peculiar upward
intonation which made me think of Emerson at whose house I had often
been. The _Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers_ found
its public at last and I suppose a copy of the first edition,
authenticated as having belonged to that queer library, would easily
bring to-day in the market its weight in gold. Whether or not
Thoreau deserves great fame the critics sometimes discuss. I heard a
distinguished man say that he was greatly inferior to Gilbert White
of Selbourne, and I myself feel that Lowell in some of his essays
recording his study of the nature life at Elmwood equalled in fine
insight, and surpassed in expression the observer at Concord. The