After his graduation at Harvard in the Class of 1837, Thoreau taught school, learned surveying and the art of making lead-pencils, and began writing and lecturing. The episode in his life which gave him more than a local reputation was his camping out by the shore of Walden Pond. He spent two years and two months there studying how ‘to live deliberately.’ His hut, built by himself, might have seemed bare and cheerless to a victim of civilization. There was no carpet on the floor, no curtain at the window. Every superfluity was stripped off and life ‘driven into a corner’ in the hope of discovering what it was made of. Thoreau sturdily resisted the efforts of friends and neighbors to burden him with trumpery, refusing the gift of a door-mat on the plea that it was ‘best to avoid the beginnings of evil,’ and throwing a paper-weight out of the window ‘because it had to be dusted every day.’ He raised his own vegetables in a patch of ground near by, made his own bread, and spent his leisure time in recording his observations of nature and in writing his first book, _A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers_. When he was satisfied with this taste of life ‘reduced to its lowest terms,’ he went back to civilization. _A Week on the Concord and Merrimack_ was a failure, as publishers say; meaning that it did not sell. Having published at his own expense, Thoreau was financially embarrassed when seven hundred and fifty copies of an edition of a thousand came back on his hands. He said to a friend: ‘I have added several hundred volumes to my library lately, all of my own composition.’[42] His second venture, _Walden_, was more fortunate. He printed a few articles in the ‘Boston Miscellany,’ ‘Putnam’s Magazine,’ the ‘New York Tribune,’ ‘Graham’s Magazine,’ and the ‘Atlantic Monthly,’ but at no time could he be said to live by literature. His income from his lectures must have been small, and apparently he made no effort to obtain engagements. He had an exalted idea of what constitutes a good lecture, and was suspicious of oratory. He told his English acquaintance Cholmondeley that he was from time to time congratulating himself on his ‘general want of success as a lecturer.... I do my work clean as I go along, and they will not be likely to want me anywhere again.’ When Hawthorne was corresponding secretary of the Salem Lyceum, he invited Thoreau in behalf of the managers to give them a lecture. The invitation was accepted. The lecture must have had the fatal defect of being ‘interesting,’ for Thoreau was asked to speak before the Lyceum a second time the same winter.