The grandfather of America's first renowned native-born naturalist emigrated from the Island of Jersey before the American Revolution. In Boston he married a Scotchwoman. His son John also married a lady of Scotch descent, and engaged in the industry of pencil-making in Concord, Massachusetts. There Henry Thoreau was born in the month of July, 1817. His mother, a staunch, keen, observant woman "with a great love of nature," used to take her children into the woods and show them the wonders and beauties of wild life. Even as a small boy Henry had opinions and expressed them with independence, he was honest--"straight as a furrow"--sensible, good-tempered and industrious. The Thoreau family made willing sacrifices so that Henry, the second son, could enter Harvard when he was sixteen. When he was graduated he taught for awhile in Concord and on Staten Island, but found the occupation uncongenial, and soon took to less scholarly ways of making a living. Nimbly he turned from one trade to another. He did surveying, or built a neighbor's fence, planted a garden, or worked with his father in the pencil shop. He was thorough and efficient in all that he did, but, whatever the means of livelihood, he pursued it with the single purpose of securing just enough money to support his frugal needs while he went off on woodland excursions, communing, studying, writing. Simple thrifty neighbors regarded Thoreau as a visionary and reproached him for his lack of the practical virtues that they held in esteem. They called him lazy. Thoreau (he pronounced it "thorough"), however, was not wasting time. He kept a daily journal, from which several characteristic and delightfully refreshing volumes were later compiled. When still a young man, Thoreau resolved to seek a retreat in the woods where he could live undisturbed in his enjoyment of the "indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature." Emerson, a close friend in whose house he had lived for a time, granted him the use of some land near Walden Pond, about a mile and a half from Concord. Thoreau cleared the woodland site himself and erected a small shelter, at whose "raising" a number of notable literary men were present. Beginning with the summer of 1845, this philosopher with the "thin, penetrating, big-nosed face," the deep-set eyes and spare, long-limbed figure, this naturalist who used neither trap nor gun, lived in his hut, remaining for about two years. He planted enough ground to give him food, and often received his friends, who sincerely loved him for his unique qualities of mind and soul. At Walden Thoreau compiled and wrote two of his best-known books--"A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers" and "Walden, or Life in the Woods." The latter has gone into many editions in several languages.