BY THE WAYSIDE 
OFFICIAL ORGAN OF THE WISCONSIN AND ILLINOIS AUDUBON SOCIETIES 
One Year 25 Cents PRICE THREE CENTS One Year 25 Cents 
Published by the Wisconsin Audubon Society, at Madison, Wisconsin 
ENTERED AT THE MADISON POSTOFFICE AS SECOND-CLASS MATTER 
VOL. V AUGUST, SEPTEMBER, 1902 Nos 4 and 5 
Henry D. Thoreau (181M862). 
Thoreau began life as a pencil-maker in 
Concord, Mass., and in this trade he ac¬ 
quired great skill. He had a clever turn 
with tools, a fine sense of touch, and a keen 
insight into details. It was said of him that 
he could arrange pencils into dozens simply 
by taking up the required number in his 
hand, without counting. In 1833 he entered 
Harvard, where he graduated, though he was 
never considered a good scholar. He tried 
teaching, lecturing, and writing for maga¬ 
zines; but did not find any of these occupa¬ 
tions congenial. He gave up his pencil-mak¬ 
ing just when it promised to make him rich. 
In 1845 he built a house at Walden Pond, near 
Concord, and lived there in complete solitude 
for two years. Here he wrote his'best work, 
Walden, a description of the natural life of 
which he was so long a part. After this ex¬ 
perience at Walden he earned his livelihood 
in a very irregular fashion, doing anything 
that came to hand, from carpentering to sur¬ 
veying. The larger part of his time was 
spent in what he called “sauntering” in the 
open air, about the fields and along the 
streams. He never went far from his native 
state; but he visited Maine several times, 
and his book, In the Maine Woods, is the re¬ 
sult of his trips. Thoreau was a true lover 
of nature; he had little use for books except 
as supplying him with information not to be 
obtained from nature. He had no patience 
with the usual ambitions and rivalries and 
hurry of business life. He preferred the 
freedom, the charm and beauty of nature to 
wealth, social position, fame, or opportuni¬ 
ties of travel. He was fond of saying that in 
his little home town in Massachusetts could 
be seen most of the marvels people travel for 
to see in foreign lands. Probably no Ameri¬ 
can writer ever spent so much time out of 
doors as did Thoreau. He was the first great 
apostle of the new hunting that does not 
allow of killing. Not a single bird perished, 
not a nest suffered, in order to enrich his 
collection. He did not believe in collections. 
The trees and flowers and all living things 
were his friends and comrades all his life; 
so he studied them at close range as few 
have done since his time. It was a saying of 
his that any bird or wild creature would 
come close to one if he but made himself 
into a stick or stone for an hour or two. 
Certainly no one ever more successfully 
made himself into a motionless object; and 
seated where the shyest creatures were mov¬ 
ing all about him, he saw and heard what no 
one had ever been able to see or hear. His 
works are full of knowledge of wild things 
which he obtained in this way. Yet he 
rarely spoke of what he knew, and he was 
known to his neighbors as the man who 
could tell the berry-gatherers and nutting-par¬ 
ties where to go for the best berries and nuts. 
He knew his locality—every farm and wood 
and stream in it. He kept an accurate ac¬ 
count of the date of the flowering time of 
every plant, the time of arrival of every bird. 
If we are to believe him he could tell the day 
of the month by the scents of blossoms in 
his own swamps and meadows; he once said 
that if he should wake up in the night in 
the midst of one of these natural flower- 
gardens he could tell with certainty the time 
of night as well as the day of the month. 
Though little understood by those of his 
own time, Thoreau’s reputation has been 
growing steadily. He was more than a 
student of nature; he was something of a 
poet, and a good deal of a philosopher. Per- 
