Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/183

Rh In 1853, he records that by surveying, in which he was always expert, he made a dollar a day for seventy-six successive days work. Perhaps this statement explains the unique comment on Thoreau by a so-called historian of Concord,—"His profession was that of a surveyor and it is easy to imagine how, with his poetic temperament, while laying out roads and measuring wood-lots, he came to be what he was." Could there be a more complete reversal of facts? In such a picture he becomes Admetus serving some Apollo.

In 1849–1850 he says that he manufactured one thousand dollars worth of pencils and finally sacrificed them in price to pay a debt of one hundred dollars. Probably this work, and some of the returns from surveying, paid the expense of his first book, issued by Munroe of Boston in 1849. This account of the week's excursion on the Concord and Merrimack rivers, gained a few favorable reviews, among them Lowell's in The Massachusetts Quarterly, quite different in tone from his later sharp, piquant essay, to receive attention in another chapter. Favorable reviews, however, do not always ensure buyers, and the volume was doomed to join that long list of the unsold. The story is familiar of the return, in 1853, of seven hundred copies of this first edition, which Thoreau