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.  Then in these later years we have had John Muir and John Burroughs who cannot be set low, but among American writers Thoreau was the pioneer of nature-study.  Audubon had preceded him but he worked mainly with the brush; to multitudes Thoreau opened the gate to the secrets of our natural environment.  The subtle delicacy of the grass-blade, the crystals of the snowflake, the icicle, the marvel of the weird lines traced by the flocks of wild geese athwart the heavens as they migrated, these he watched and recorded with loving accuracy and sensitive poetic feeling as no one in our land before had done.  I have thrown a stone upon the cairn at Walden Pond which has now grown so high through the tributes of his grateful admirers.  I shall throw still others in grateful admiration if the opportunity comes to me.