(56 THE AMERICAN BOTANIST. 



Pond and lived there by himself for more than two years. It 

 was here he wrote his first and most famous book which he 

 named "Walden," and here, also, was undoubtedly carried on 

 much of the writing of his "Week on the Concord and Merri- 

 mac Rivers." Concerning the location of his house, he says in 

 "Walden:" "Near the end of March 1845 I borrowed an axe 

 and went down to the woods by Walden Pond nearest to where 

 I intended to build my house and began to cut down some tall 

 arrowy white pines, still in their youth, for timber. It was a 

 pleasant hillside where I worked, covered with pine woods 

 through which I looked out on the pond and a small open 

 field in the woods where pines and hickories were springing 

 up" As to his reasons for taking up his residence here he says 

 in another place, "I went to the woods because I wished to 

 live deliberately, to front onl> the essential facts of life, and 

 see if I could not learn what it has to teach and not, when I 

 came to die, discover that I had not lived." 



After he abandoned his house it was taken by a Scotch 

 gardener who moved it some rods away into Thoreau's bean- 

 field. A few years later it was carried three miles northward 

 where it stood until after Thoreau's death On the title-page 

 of the first edition of "Walden" there is a cut of the house 

 from a drawing made by Thoreau's sister Sophia but. accord- 

 ing to Sanborn, the biographer of Thoreau, the trees are not 

 accurately drawn. 



On the spot where Thoreau's house first stood there is now 

 a cairn of stones which is constantly increasing in size as each 

 pilgrim to the spot adds a stone from the shore to the pile. An 

 illustration of this interesting spot is given in the frontispiece 

 of this issue. It was made from a photograph taken by the 

 botanist Alfred W. Hosmer and selected for the editor by Prof. 

 J. Y. Bergen, author of the well-known botanical texts. On 

 the back of the photograph, probably in Hosmer's handwriting 

 is the title "Thoreau's Cove, Walden." 



