This volume, from the peculiar experiment which it recorded, was somewhat more successful, but the public was not yet ready for this sort of nature interpretation, mixed with the sententious wisdom and moral meditations of the poetnaturalist. Thoreau was not enough encouraged to try another volume during his lifetime, but since his death his fame has been steadily growing. No American writer had to wait so long for his audience, but it now seems that none will hold his audience longer. During his lifetime he was highly appreciated by Emerson, Channing, Higginson, and a few others; but the great body of readers and critics, headed by Lowell, condemned him with slight praise, ranking him as a pale imitator of Emerson and as a mere poseur. It took half a century for the world to discover his real genius.

Thoreau did his best thinking during his long daily walks. His notes of his walks are delightful records, and some of his best books, published since his death, are the results of his walking tours, as for example, The Maine Woods and Cape Cod, edited by Emerson, and four other books edited by H. G. O. Blake under the title of the four seasons. These posthumous volumes consisted of previously published papers and extracts from the thirty or more manuscript volumes of Thoreau's Journals. Finally in 1896 the Journals themselves were published in fourteen volumes, so that now we have a perfect quarry of Thoreau material to dig in at will.

It is a pity that Thoreau did not live to prepare his own books for publication, for he was a minute reviser and a careful workman on his literary style in the proof sheets. Perhaps we may console ourselves with the thought that the unpruned records as we have them give us after all a true picture of the man as he was. About 1860 he exposed himself too freely in his long winter walks, and contracted consumption. He went to Minnesota for a time to see if the dry climate might not help him, but he returned not greatly benefited, and became a helpless but patient invalid. He died May 6, 1862, and was buried in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery of his native town. Close by the spot where Thoreau's cabin stood near Walden Pond, a large cairn of loose stones has been gradually raised to his memory by the hundreds of pilgrims who come annually to this literary shrine.

(The best life of this author is Thoreau: the Poet-Naturalist by W. E. Channing, revised by F. B. Sanborn. A good short biography is that by Henry S. Salt in the Great Writers Series.)

BRUTE NEIGHBORS

Chapter XII of Walden, or Life in the Woods

Sometimes I had a companion in my fishing, who came through the village to my house from the other side of the town, and the catching of the dinner was as much a social exercise as the eating of it.

Hermit. I wonder what the world is doing now. I have s not heard so much as a locust over the sweet-fern these three hours. The pigeons are all asleep upon their roosts,no flutter from them. Was that a farmer's noon horn which sounded from beyond the woods just now? The hands are coming in to boiled salt beef and cider and Indian bread. 10 Why will men worry themselves so? He that does not eat need not work. I wonder how much they have reaped. Who would live there where a body can never think for the barking of Bose? And O, the housekeeping! to keep bright the devil's door-knobs, and scour his tubs this bright day! 15 Better not keep a house. Say, some hollow tree; and then for morning calls and dinner-parties! Only a woodpecker tapping. O, they swarm; the sun is too warm there; they are born too far into life for me. I have water from the spring, and a loaf of brown bread on the shelf.-Hark! I hear a rust- 20 ling of the leaves. Is it some ill-fed village hound yielding to the instinct of the chase? or the lost pig which is said to be in these woods, whose tracks I saw after the rain? It comes on apace; my sumachs and sweet-briers tremble.Eh, Mr. Poet, is it you? How do you like the world to-day? 25 Poet. See those clouds; how they hang! That's the greatest thing I have seen to-day. There's nothing like it in old paintings, nothing like it in foreign lands,-unless when we were off the coast of Spain. That's a true Mediterranean sky. I thought, as I have my living to get, and 80

have not eaten to-day, that I might go a-fishing. That's the true industry for poets. It is the only trade I have learned. Come, let's along.

Hermit. I cannot resist. My brown bread will soon be 35 gone. I will go with you gladly soon, but I am just concluding a serious meditation. I think that I am near the end of it. Leave me alone, then, for a while. But that we may not be delayed, you shall be digging the bait meanwhile. Angle-worms are rarely to be met with in these parts, where 40 the soil was never fattened with manure; the race is nearly extinct. The sport of digging the bait is nearly equal to that of catching the fish, when one's appetite is not too keen; and this you may have all to yourself to-day. I would advise you to set in the spade down yonder among the 45 ground-nuts, where you see the johnswort waving. I think that I may warrant you one worm to every three sods you turn up, if you look well in among the roots of the grass, as if you were weeding. Or, if you choose to go farther, it will not be unwise, for I have found the increase of fair bait 50 to be very nearly as the squares of the distances.

Methinks I was

Hermit alone. Let me see; where was I? nearly in this frame of mind; the world lay about at this angle. Shall I go to heaven or a-fishing? If I should soon bring this meditation to an end, would another so sweet 55 occasion be likely to offer? I was as near being resolved into the essence of things as ever I was in my life. I fear my thoughts will not come back to me. If it would do any good, I would whistle for them. When they make us an offer, is it wise to say, We will think of it? My thoughts 60 have left no track, and I cannot find the path again. What was it that I was thinking of? It was a very hazy day. I will just try these three sentences of Con-fut-see; they may fetch that state about again. I know not whether it was the dumps or a budding ecstasy. Mem. There never is but one 65 opportunity of a kind.

Poet. How now, Hermit, is it too soon? I have got just

thirteen whole ones, beside several which are imperfect or undersized; but they will do for the smaller fry; they do not cover up the hook so much. Those village worms are quite too large; a shiner may make a meal off one without finding 70 the skewer.

Hermit. Well, then, let's be off. Shall we to the Concord? There's good sport there if the water be not too high.

Why do precisely these objects which we behold make a world? Why has man just these species of animals for his 75 neighbors; as if nothing but a mouse could have filled this crevice? I suspect that Pilpay & Co. have put animals to their best use, for they are all beasts of burden, in a sense, made to carry some portion of our thoughts.

The mice which haunted my house were not the common 80 ones, which are said to have been introduced into the country, but a wild native kind not found in the village. I sent one to a distinguished naturalist, and it interested him much. When I was building, one of these had its nest underneath the house, and before I had laid the second floor, and swept 85 out the shavings, would come out regularly at lunch time and pick up the crumbs at my feet. It probably had never seen a man before; and it soon became quite familiar, and would run over my shoes and up my clothes. It could readily ascend the sides of the room by short impulses, like a squirrel, 90 which it resembled in its motions. At length, as I leaned with my elbow on the bench one day, it ran up my clothes, and along my sleeve, and round and round the paper which held my dinner, while I kept the latter close, and dodged and played at bo-peep with it; and when at last I held still a piece 95 of cheese between my thumb and finger, it came and nibbled it, sitting in my hand, and afterward cleaned its face and paws, like a fly, and walked away.

A phoebe soon built in my shed, and a robin for protection in a pine which grew against the house. In June the part- 100 ridge, (Tetrao umbellus,) which is so shy a bird, led her

brood past my windows, from the woods in the rear to the front of my house, clucking and calling to them like a hen, and in all her behavior proving herself the hen of the woods. 105 The young suddenly disperse on your approach, at a signal from the mother, as if a whirlwind had swept them away, and they so exactly resemble the dried leaves and twigs that many a traveller has placed his foot in the midst of a brood, and heard the whir of the old bird as she flew off, and her 110 anxious calls and mewing, or seen her trail her wings to attract his attention, without suspecting their neighborhood. The parent will sometimes roll and spin round before you in such a dishabille, that you cannot, for a few moments, detect what kind of creature it is. The young squat still and flat, 115 often running their heads under a leaf, and mind only their mother's directions given from a distance, nor will your approach make them run again and betray themselves. You may even tread on them, or have your eyes on them for a minute, without discovering them. I have held them in 120 my open hand at such a time, and still their only care, obedient to their mother and their instinct, was to squat there without fear or trembling. So perfect is this instinct, that once, when I had laid them on the leaves again, and one accidentally fell on its side, it was found with the rest in 125 exactly the same position ten minutes afterward. They are not callow like the young of most birds, but more perfectly developed and precocious even than chickens. The remarkably adult yet innocent expression of their open and serene eyes is very memorable. All intelligence seems reflected in 130 them. They suggest not merely the purity of infancy, but a wisdom clarified by experience. Such an eye was not born when the bird was, but is coeval with the sky it reflects. The woods do not yield another such a gem. The traveller does not often look into such a limpid well. The ignorant or 135 reckless sportsman often shoots the parent at such a time, and leaves these innocents to fall a prey to some prowling beast or bird, or gradually mingle with the decaying leaves