Thoreau, happy and serene, retired still further into his shell, keeping a bright fire in his house and within his breast. All this time he wrote a good deal, and his employment out of doors was to collect dead wood and to drag it into his shed. He loved his woodpile, and would build it where he could see it in front of his window. For many weeks in the snow Thoreau would spend cheerful evenings by his fireside, and no visitors would come to the woods—only woodmen came occasionally to cut and take wood on sleds back to the village. But no weather interfered with Thoreau's walks. He managed to make a little pathway by always treading on the same track, and he would go thus in deepest snow to keep, as he expressed it, an appointment with an old beech-tree or a birch, or an old friend among the pines. His descriptions of winter in the woods are perhaps more fascinating and romantic than any other part of his "Walden," and he tells of the wonders of the coming spring, the gradual melting of the ice, the longer days, the note of some arriving bird.
His second year at Walden was, he said, the same as the first, and when he left it in September he had lived there rather over two years. He left, he said, for as good a reason as he entered it. He does not tell the reason, but it was an unselfish one. His father had died, and his relations needed some one to work for them and to make a little money; so, much as he hated it, as we know he must have done, he returned
