difficulty even to the
interruptions of friendship. "_Such are my engagements to myself_ that I
dare not promise," he once wrote in answer to an invitation; and the
italics are his own. Marcus Aurelius found time to study virtue, and
between whiles to conduct the imperial affairs of Rome; but Thoreau is
so busy improving himself that he must think twice about a morning call.
And now imagine him condemned for eight hours a day to some uncongenial
and unmeaning business! He shrank from the very look of the mechanical
in life; all should, if possible, be sweetly spontaneous and swimmingly
progressive. Thus he learned to make lead-pencils, and, when he had
gained the best certificate, and his friends began to congratulate him
on his establishment in life, calmly announced that he should never make
another. "Why should I?" said he; "I would not do again what I have done
once." For when a thing has once been done as well as it wants to be, it
is of no further interest to the self-improver. Yet in after years, and
when it became needful to support his family, he returned patiently to
this mechanical art--a step more than worthy of himself.

The pencils seem to have been Apollo's first experiment in the service
of Admetus; but others followed. "I have thoroughly tried
school-keeping," he writes, "and found that my expenses were in
proportion, or rather out of proportion, to my income; for I was obliged
to dress and train, not to say, think and believe, accordingly, and I
lost my time into the bargain. As I did not teach for the benefit of my
fellow-men, but simply for a livelihood, this was a failure. I have
tried trade, but I found that it would take ten years to get under way
in that, and that then I should probably be on my way to the devil."
Nothing, indeed, can surpass his scorn for all so-called business. Upon
that subject gall squirts from him at a touch. "The whole enterprise of
this nation is not illustrated by a thought," he writes; "it is not
warmed by a sentiment; there is nothing in it for which a man should lay
down his life, nor even his gloves." And again: "If our merchants did
not most of them fail, and the banks too, my faith in the old laws of
this world would be staggered. The statement that ninety-six in a
hundred doing such business surely break down is perhaps the sweetest
fact that statistics have revealed." The wish was probably father to the
figures; but there is something enlivening in a hatred of so