HENRY THOREAU
business, which he might have worked with profit for his family and himself, to idle in the woods, and this cannot be forgiven.
From my relation to the Thoreau family I knew something of their black-lead business after Henry's death, while carried on by his sister, and later investigated the matter with some care and with results that are surprising. I will tell the story briefly.
John Thoreau, senior, went into the pencil business on his return to Concord in 1823. He made at first such bad pencils as were then made in America, greasy, gritty, brittle, inefficient, but tried to improve them, and did so. Henry found in the College library, in an encyclopædia published in Edinburgh, what the graphite ("black lead") was mixed with in the good German pencils, viz., a certain fine Bavarian clay; while
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