ry well, and one time he
carried home from the publishers seven hundred copies that no one would
buy, saying: "Well, I have quite a respectably sized library now--all my
own writing, too!"

But four or five years later Thoreau built a hut on the shore of Walden
Pond and lived there all alone, like a hermit, for two years. He did
this for two reasons: because he wanted to prove that people spend too
much time and money on food and clothes and because he wanted a
perfectly quiet chance, with no neighbors running in, to write more
books. He said he spent but one hundred dollars a year while he lived in
this hut. He raised beans on his land, ate wild berries, caught
fish--and "went visiting" now and then. I should not wonder if he often
took a second helping of food, when visiting. To buy his woodsman's
clothes and a few necessities, he planted gardens, painted houses, and
cut wood for his friends. He wrote a book called _Walden_ which tells
all about these seven or eight hundred days he went a-hermiting, and
after that, several other books. These sold very well. In all of them he
was rather fond of boasting that he had found the only sensible way to
live. "I am for simple living," he would say, and always was declaring
"I love to be ALONE!" But sometimes people passing by the pond used to
hear him whistling old ballads, or playing very softly and beautifully
on a flute, and they thought he sounded lonely. Although he makes you
feel, when you read his books, that it is fine to roam the fields,
sniffing the wild grape and the yellow violets, and that no one can find
pleasure like the man who rows, and skates, and swims, and tills the
soil, yet the question is bound to come: "_Is_ a man all alone in a hut
any better off than a jolly father in a big house, playing games with
his children?"

Let me tell you, too, that after all Thoreau's talk about wanting to be
alone, the last year he lived in the hut, he used to steal off, just at
twilight, to a neighbor's house where there were little children. While
they curled up on a rug, in front of the open fire, he would draw near
in a big rocking-chair and sit for an hour or more telling them stories
of his childhood. He would pop corn, make whistles for them with his
jack-knife, or, best of all, do some of the juggling tricks, which he
had learned, as a boy, from his uncle Charles. And one day he appeared
at the door with a hay-rack to give them a ride. He had covered the
bottom of