tub of Walden sunlight and roused, if at all, to warn all outsiders away from the rays of his special possession, Nature. The much-exploited incident of his Walden life, which we shall regard as an experiment, as he called it, represented only two years and a half of his forty-five years. It has been so overemphasized that "the hermit of Walden" has become his world-wide sobriquet; to many, as to Dr. Japp, Thoreau seemed "an odd, unaccountable kind of person." No one would assert that the motives of critics and biographers have been due, in the main, to intentional injustice to Thoreau; rather has there been a desire to picture, in the most dramatic light, one of the most unique and romantic episodes of modern literary history. A mystical charm always encircles the lives of hermits and ascetics, from John the Baptist and the early Essenes to Tristram and Roger Crab. A far greater curiosity has centred about this young recluse of modern life, who came from and returned to a happy home, who preached no religious creed or social scheme but who found in his life at Walden nucleus for a volume of bright, charming studies of nature, society, morality, and his relation to all three factors. The close student of Thoreau's life and records, coupled with the testimony of friends who visited him at Walden, must
