Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/58

38 Works." The fine grinding, by a small weighted machine of interlocked boxes, the rolling and packing, were completed in the upper room in the ell of the Thoreau-Alcott house.

As is often noted in genealogy, the French traits were less pronounced in the first generation of American Thoreaus than in the Concord family. "Aunt Maria," however, boasted "the vivacity of the French," which she seems to have exampled in tongue and pen. A frequent sentence in the letters from Henry's sisters, reads, "Aunt Maria, of course, has written you all the news." John Thoreau, on the other hand, exampled the reticent composure of the Quaker and the sturdy, industrious qualities of his Scotch inheritance, mingled with deft and inventive skill. Punctilious in every detail of life, reserved before strangers yet an interesting companion to friends, he was deeply respected by his townsmen, as was evidenced at his death in 1859. His was not "the plodding, unambitious nature" which has been attributed to him. Unfortunate in mercantile affairs, as was many another during the early years of the last century, he amply redeemed his failure by his ideal honesty and his later persistent and successful manufacture of pencils, plumbago, marbled paper and allied commodities. An unambitious man would not, from a limited income, have