Our Friend John Burroughs

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He remembers when four or five years old crying over a thing which
had caused him deep chagrin: A larger boy--"the meanest boy I ever
knew, and he became the meanest man," he said with spirit--"found
me sulking under a tree in the corner of the school-yard; he bribed
me with a slate pencil into confessing what I was crying about, but
as soon as I had told him, he ran away with the pencil, shouting my
secret to the other boys."

One day we went 'cross lots after spearmint for jelly for the table
at Woodchuck Lodge, and an abandoned house near the mint-patches
recalled to Mr. Burroughs the first time he had heard the word
"taste" used, except in reference to food. The woman who had lived
in this house, while calling at his home and seeing his attempt at
drawing something, had said, "What taste that boy has!" "It made me
open my eyes--'taste'!--then there was another kind of taste than
the one I knew about--the taste of things I ate!"

At a place in the road near the old stone schoolhouse, he showed me
where, as a lad of thirteen, perhaps, he had stopped to watch some
men working the road, and had first heard the word "antiquities"
used. "They had uncovered and removed a large flat stone, and under
it were other stones, probably arranged by the hands of earlier
roadmakers. David Corbin, a man who had had some schooling, said,
as they exposed the earlier layers, 'Ah! here are antiquities!'
The word made a lasting impression on me."

[Illustration: View of the Catskills from Woodchuck Lodge.
From a photograph by Charles S. Olcott]

One of our favorite walks at sunset was up the hill beyond the old
home where the road winds around a neglected graveyard. From this
high vantage-ground one can see two of the Catskill giants--Double
Top and Mount Graham. It was not a favorite walk of the boy John
Burroughs. He told how, even in his early teens, at dusk, he would
tiptoe around the corner past the graveyard, afraid to run for fear
a gang of ghosts would be at his heels. "When I got down the road
a ways, though, how I would run!" He was always "scairy" if he had
to come along the edge of the woods alone at nightfall, and was
even afraid of the big black hole under the barn in the daytime:
"I was tortured with the thought of what might lurk there in that
great black abyss, and would hustle through my work of cleaning
the stable, working like Hercules, and often sending in 'Cuff,'
the dog, to scare 'em out."

Fed on stories of ghosts and hobgoblins in childhood, his active,
sensitive imagination became an easy prey to these fears. But
we do outgrow some things. In the summer of 1911 this grown-up
boy waxed so bold that he sat in the barn with its black hole
underneath and wrote of "The Phantoms Behind Us." There was still
something Herculean in his task; he looked boldly down into the
black abysms of Time, not without some shrinking, it is true,
saw the "huge first Nothing," faced the spectres as they rose
before him, wrestled with them, and triumphantly conquered by
acknowledging each phantom as a friendly power--a creature on
whose shoulders he had raised himself to higher and higher levels;
he saw that though the blackness was peopled with uncouth and
gigantic forms, out of all these there at last arose the being
Man, who could put all creatures under his feet.

Along the road between the old home and Woodchuck Lodge are some
rocks which were the "giant stairs" of his childhood. On these
he played, and he is fond now of pausing and resting there as he
recalls events of those days.

"Are these rocks very old?" some one asked him one day.

"Oh, yes; they've been here since Adam was a kitten."

Whichever way he turns, memories of early days awaken; as he
himself has somewhere said in print, "there is a deposit of him
all over the landscape where he has lived."

As we have learned, Mr. Burroughs seems to have been more alive
than his brothers and playmates, to have had wider interests and
activities. When, a lad, he saw his first warbler in the "Deacon
Woods," the black-throated blue-back, he was excited and curious as
to what the strange bird could be (so like a visitant from another
clime it seemed); the other boys met his queries with indifference,
but for him it was the event of the day; it was far more, it was
the keynote to all his days; it opened his eyes to the life about
him--here, right in the "Deacon Woods," were such exquisite
creatures! It fired him with a desire to find out about them.
That tiny flitting warbler! How far its little wings have carried
it! What an influence it has had on American literature, and on
the lives of readers for the past fifty years, sending them to
nature, opening their eyes to the beauty that is common and near
at hand! One feels like thanking the Giver of all good that a
little barefoot boy noted the warbler that spring day as it flitted
about in the beeches wood. Life has been sweeter and richer because
of it.

Down the road a piece is the place where this boy made a miniature
sawmill, sawing cucumbers for logs. On this very rock where we sit
he used to catch the flying grasshoppers early of an August
morning--"the big brown fellows that fly like birds"; they would
congregate here during the night to avail themselves of the warmth
of the rocks, and here he would stop on his way from driving the
cows to pasture, and catch them napping.

Yonder in the field by a stone wall, under a maple which is no longer
standing, in his early twenties he read Schlemiel's "Philosophy of
History," one of the volumes which, when a youth, he had found in an
old bookstall in New York, on the occasion of his first trip there.

"Off there through what we used to call the 'Long Woods' lies the
road along which Father used to travel in the autumn when he took
his butter to Catskill, fifty miles away. Each boy went in turn.
When it came my turn to go, I was in a great state of excitement
for a week beforehand, for fear my clothes would not be ready, or
else it would be too cold, or that the world would come to an end
before the time of starting. Perched high on a spring-seat, I made
the journey and saw more sights and wonders than I have ever seen
on a journey since."

On the drive up from the village he showed me the place, a mile
or more from their haunts on the breezy mountain lands, where the
sheep were driven annually to be washed. It was a deep pool then,
and a gristmill stood near by. He said he could see now the
huddled sheep, and the overhanging rocks with the phoebes' nests
in the crevices.

"Down in the Hollow," as they call the village of Robbery, he drew
my attention to the building which was once the old academy, and
where he had his dream of going to school. He remembers as a lad
of thirteen going down to the village one evening to hear a man,
McLaurie, talk up the academy before there was one in Roxbury. "I
remember it as if it were yesterday; a few of the leading men of
the village were there. I was the only boy. I've wondered since
what possessed me to go. In his talk the man spoke of what a
blessing it would be to boys of that vicinity, pointing me out and
saying, 'Now, like that boy, there.' I recall how I dropped my
head and blushed. He was a small man, very much in earnest.
When I heard of his death a few years ago, it gave me long, long
thoughts. He finally got the academy going, taught it, and had a
successful school there for several years, but I never got there.
The school in the West Settlement, Father thought, was good enough
for me. But my desire to go, and dreaming of it, impressed it
and him upon me more, perhaps, than the boys who really went were
impressed. How outside of it all I felt when I used to go down
there to the school exhibitions! It was after that that I had
my dream of going to Harpersfield Seminary--the very name had a
romantic sound. Though Father had promised me I might go, when
the time came he couldn't afford it; he didn't mean to go back
on his word, but there was very little money--I wonder how they
got along so well as they did with so little."

"As a boy it had been instilled into my mind that God would strike
one dead for mocking him. One day Ras Jenkins and I were crossing
this field when it began to thunder. Ras turned up his lips to
the clouds contemptuously. 'Oh, don't, you'll be struck,' I cried,
cringing in expectation of the avenging thunderbolt. What a
revelation it was when he was not struck! I immediately began to
think, 'Now, maybe God isn't so easily offended as I thought'; but
it seemed to me any God with dignity ought to have been offended
by such an act."

Mr. Burroughs showed me the old rosebush in the pasture, all that
was left to mark the site where a house had once stood; even before
his boyhood days this house had become a thing of the past. The
roses, though, had always been a joy to him, and had played such a
part in his early days that he had transplanted some of the old bush
to a spot near his doorsteps at Slabsides. Once when he sent me
some of the roses he wrote of them thus: "The roses of my boyhood!
Take the first barefooted country lad you see with homemade linen
trousers and shirt, and ragged straw hat, and put some of these
roses in his hand, and you see me as I was fifty-five years ago.
They are the identical roses, mind you. Sometime I will show you
the bush in the old pasture where they grew."

One day we followed the course he and his brothers and sisters used
to take on their way to school. Leaving the highway near the old
graveyard, we went down across a meadow, then through a beech wood,
and on through the pastures in the valley along which a trout brook
used to flow, on across more meadows and past where a neglected
orchard was, till we came to where the little old schoolhouse
itself stood.

How these trout streams used to lure him to play hookey! All the
summer noonings, too, were spent there. He spoke feelingly of the
one that coursed through the hemlocks--"loitering, log-impeded,
losing itself in the dusky, fragrant depths of the hemlocks." They
used to play hookey down at Stratton Falls, too, and get the green
streaks in the old red sandstone rocks to make slate pencils of,
trying them on their teeth to make sure they were soft enough not
to scratch their slates. The woods have been greatly mutilated
in which they used to loiter on the way to school and gather
crinkle-root to eat with their lunches,--though they usually ate
it all up before lunch-time came, he said. In one of his books
Mr. Burroughs speaks of a schoolmate who, when dying, said, "I must
hurry, I have a long way to go over a hill and through a wood, and
it is getting dark." This was his brother Wilson, and he doubtless
had in mind this very course they used to take in going to school.

This school (where Jay Gould was his playmate) he attended only
until he was twelve years of age. A rather curious reciprocal help
these two lads gave each other--especially curious in the light of
their subsequent careers as writer and financier. The boy John
Burroughs was one day feeling very uncomfortable because he could
not furnish a composition required of him. Eight lines only were
sufficient if the task was completed on time, but the time was up
and no line was written. This meant being kept after school to
write twelve lines. In this extremity. Jay Gould came to his
rescue with the following doggerel:--

"Time is flying past,
Night is coming fast,
I, minus two, as you all know,
But what is more
I must hand o'er
Twelve lines by night,
Or stay and write.
Just eight I've got
But you know that's not
Enough lacking four,
But to have twelve
It wants no more."

"I have never been able to make out what the third line meant,"
said Mr. Burroughs. A few years later, when Jay Gould was hard
up (he had left school and was making a map of Delaware County),
John Burroughs helped him out by buying two old books of him,
paying him eighty cents. The books were a German grammar and
Gray's "Elements of Geology." The embryo financier was glad to
get the cash, and the embryo writer unquestionably felt the richer
in possessing the books.

Mr. Burroughs loves to look off toward Montgomery Hollow and talk
of the old haunt. "I've taken many a fine string of trout from
that stream," he would say. One day he and his brother Curtis and
I drove over there and fished the stream, and he could hardly stay
in the wagon the last half-mile. "Isn't it time to get out now,
Curtis?" he fidgeted every little while. "Not yet, John,--not
yet," said the more phlegmatic brother. But it was August, and
although the rapid mountain brook seemed just the place for trout,
the trout were not in their places. I shall long remember the
enticing stream, the pretty cascades, the high shelving rocks
sheltering the mossy nest of the phoebe, and the glowing masses of
bee-balm blooming beside the stream; yes, and the eagerness of one
of the fishermen as he slipped along ahead of me, dropping his hook
into the pools. Occasionally he would relinquish the rod, putting
it into my hands with a rare self-denial as we came to a promising
pool; but I was more deft at gathering bee-balm than taking trout,
and willingly spared the rod to the eager angler. And even he
secured only two troutling to carry back in his mint-lined creel.

"Trout streams gurgled about the roots of my family tree," he was
wont to say as he told of his grandfather Kelly's ardor for the
pastime. One day, in crossing the fields near the old home, he
showed me the stone wall where he and his grandfather tarried the
last time they went fishing together, he a boy of ten and his
grandfather past eighty. As they rested on the wall, the old man,
without noticing it, sat on the lad's hand as it lay on the wall.
"It hurt," Mr. Burroughs said, "but I didn't move till he got ready
to get up."

It was a great pleasure to go through the old sap bush with Mr.
Burroughs, for there he always lives over again the days in early
spring when sugar-making was in progress. He showed where some of
the old trees once stood,--the grandmother trees,--and mourned that
they were no more; but some of the mighty maples of his boyhood are
still standing, and each recalls youthful experiences. He sometimes
goes back there now in early spring to re-create the idyllic days.
Their ways of boiling sap are different now, and he finds less
poetry in the process. But the look of the old trees, the laugh
of the robins, and the soft nasal calls of the nuthatch, he says,
are the same as in the old times. "How these sounds ignore the
years!" he exclaimed as a nuthatch piped in the near-by trees.

Sometimes he would bring over to Woodchuck Lodge from the homestead
a cake of maple sugar from the veteran trees, and some of the
maple-sugar cookies such as his mother used to make; though he eats
sparingly of sweets nowadays. Yet, when he and a small boy would
clear the table and take the food down cellar, it was no uncommon
thing to see them emerge from the stairway, each munching one of
those fat cookies, their eyes twinkling at the thought that they
had found the forbidden sweets we had hidden so carefully.

He and this lad of eleven were great chums; they chased wild bees
together, putting honey on the stone wall, getting a line on the
bees; shelled beechnuts and cracked butternuts for the chipmunks;
caught skunks in a trap, just to demonstrate that a skunk can be
carried by the tail with impunity, if you only do it right (and,
though succeeding one day, got the worst of the bargain the next);
and waged war early and late on the flabby woodchucks which one
could see almost any hour in the day undulating across the fields.
We called these boys "John of Woods," and "John of Woodchucks";
and it was sometimes difficult to say which was the veriest boy,
the one of eleven or the one of seventy-four.

One morning I heard them laughing gleefully together as they were
doing up the breakfast work. Calling out to learn the cause of
their merriment, I found the elder John had forgotten to eat his
egg--he had just found it in his coat-pocket, having put it in
there to carry from the kitchen to the living-room.

He often amused us by his recital of Thackeray's absurd "Little
Billee," and by the application of some of the lines to events
in the life at Woodchuck Lodge.

[Illustration: Living-Room, Woodchuck Lodge, with Rustic Furniture
made by Mr. Burroughs. From a photograph by M. H. Fanning]

As the evenings grew longer and cooler, we would gather about the
table and Mr. Burroughs would read aloud, sometimes from Bergson's
"Creative Evolution," under the spell of which he was the entire
summer of 1911, sometimes from Wordsworth, sometimes from Whitman.
"No other English poet has touched me quite so closely," he said,
"as Wordsworth. . . . But his poetry has more the character of a
message, and a message special and personal, to a comparatively
small circle of readers." As he read "The Poet's Epitaph" one
evening, I was impressed with the strong likeness the portrait
there drawn has to Mr. Burroughs:--

"The outward shows of sky and earth,
Of hill and valley, he has viewed;
And impulses of deeper birth
Have come to him in solitude.

In common things that round us lie
Some random truths he can impart,--
The harvest of a quiet eye
That broods and sleeps on his own heart."

What are the books, and notably the later philosophical essays,
of Mr. Burroughs but the "harvest of a quiet eye"? His "Summit of
the Years," his "Gospel of Nature" (which one of his friends calls
"The Gospel according to Saint John"), his "Noon of Science," his
"Long Road"? And most of this rich harvest he has gathered in his
journeys back to Pepacton, inspired by the scenes amid which he
first felt the desire to write.

Seeing him daily in these scenes, one feels that it may, indeed,
be said of him as Matthew Arnold said of Sophocles, that he sees
life steadily, and sees it whole. What a masterly handling is
his of the facts of the universe, giving his reader the truths
of the scientist touched with an idealism such as is only known
to the poet's soul! A friend, writing me of "The Summit of the
Years," spoke of "its splendid ascent by a rapid crescendo from
the personal to the cosmic," and of how gratifying it is to see
our author putting forth such fine work in his advancing years.
Another friend called it "a beautiful record of a beautiful life."
I recall the September morning on which he began that essay. He
had written the first sentence--"The longer I live, the more I am
impressed with the beauty and the wonder of the world"--when he was
interrupted for a time. He spoke of what he had written, and said
he hardly knew what he was going to make of it. Later in the day
he brought me a large part of the essay to copy, and I remember how
moved I was at its beauty, how grateful that I had been present at
its inception and birth.

One afternoon he called us from our separate work, the artist from
her canvas and me from my typewriter, to look at a wonderful rainbow
spanning the wide valley below us. The next day he brought me a
short manuscript saying, "If that seems worth while to you, you
may copy it--I don't know whether there is anything in it or not."
It was "The Rainbow," which appeared some months later in a popular
magazine--a little gem, and a good illustration of his ability to
throw the witchery of the ideal around the facts of nature. The
lad with us had been learning Wordsworth's "Rainbow," a favorite
of Mr. Burroughs, and it was no unusual thing of a morning to hear
the rustic philosopher while frying the bacon for breakfast, singing
contentedly in a sort of tune of his own making:--

"And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety."

One afternoon a neighbor came and took him in her automobile a
ride of fifty miles or more, the objective point of which was
Ashland, the place where he had attended a seminary in 1854 and
1855. On his return he said it seemed like wizard's work that
he could be whisked there and back in one afternoon, to that
place which had been the goal of his youthful dreams! They had
also called on a schoolmate whom he had not seen for forty years.
He told us how a possession of that boy's had been a thing he had
coveted for many months--a slate pencil with a shining copper
gun-cap! "How I longed for that pencil! I tried to trade for
buttons (all I had to offer in exchange), but it was too precious
for my small barter, and I coveted it in vain." The wistful Celt
began early to sigh for the unattainable.

We picked wild strawberries in June from the "clover lot" where
the boy John Burroughs and his mother used to pick them. "I can
see her now," he said reminiscently, "her bent figure moving slowly
in the summer fields toward home with her basket filled. She would
also go berrying on Old Clump, in early haying, long after the
berries were gone in the lowlands."

During this summer of which I speak, the fields were a gorgeous mass
of color--buttercups and daisies, and the orange hawkweed--a display
that rivaled the carpet of gold and purple we had seen in the San
Joaquin Valley, in company with John Muir three summers before. Mr.
Muir was done before starting for South America. He had promised
to come to the Catskills, but had to keep putting it off to get
copy ready, and the Laird of Woodchuck Lodge was exasperated that
the mountaineer would stay in that hot Babylon,--he, the lover
of the wild,--when we in the Delectable Mountains were calling him
hither. As we looked upon the riot of color one day, Mr. Burroughs
said, "John Muir, confound him! I wish he was here to see this
at its height!"

Returning to the little gray farmhouse in the gathering dusk one
late September day, Mr. Burroughs paused and turned, looking back
at the old home, and up at the cattle silhouetted against the
horizon. He gazed upon the landscape long and long. How fondly
his eye dwells upon these scenes! So I have seen him look when
about to part from a friend--as if he were trying to fix the
features and expression in his mind forever.

"The older one grows, the more the later years erode away, as do
the secondary rocks, and one gets down to bed-rock,--youth,--and
there he wants to rest. These scenes make youth and all the early
life real to me, the rest is more like a dream. How incredible it
is!--all that is gone; but here it lives again."

[Illustration: On the Porch at Woodchuck Lodge. From a photograph
by Charles S. Olcott]

And yet, though he is face to face with the past at his old home,
his days there are not so sad as some of his reminiscent talk would
seem to indicate. In truth, he is serenely content, so much so
that he sometimes almost chides himself for living so much in the
present. "Oh, the power of a living reality to veil or blot out
the Past!" he sighed. "And yet, is it not best so? Does not the
grass grow above graves? Why should these lovely scenes always
be a cemetery to me? There seems to have been a spell put upon
them that has laid the ghosts, and I am glad." And to see him
bird-nesting with his grandchildren, hunting in the woods for
crooked sticks for his rustic furniture, waking the echo in the
"new barn" (a barn that was new in 1844), routing out a woodchuck
from a stone wall, blackberrying on the steep hillsides, or going
a half-mile across the fields just to smell the fragrance of the
buckwheat bloom, is to know that, wistful Celt that he is, and
dominated by the spell of the Past, he is yet very much alive to
the Present, out of which he is probably getting as full a measure
of content as any man living to-day.

He looked about him at the close of his first stay at Woodchuck
Lodge after the completion of the repairs which had made the house
so homelike and comfortable, and said contentedly: "A beautiful
dream come true! And to think I've stayed down there on the Hudson
all these years with never the home feeling, when here were my
native hills waiting to cradle me as they did in my youth, and I so
slow to return to them! I've been homesick for over forty years: I
was an alien there; I couldn't take root there. It was a lucky day
when I decided to spend the rest of my summers here"

CAMPING WITH BURROUGHS AND MUIR

In February, 1909, I was one of a small party which set out with
Mr. Burroughs for the Pacific Coast and the Hawaiian Islands. The
lure held out to him by the friend who arranged his trip was that
John Muir would start from his home at Martinez, California, and
await him at the Petrified Forests in Arizona; conduct him through,
that weirdly picturesque region, and in and around the Grand Canon
of the Colorado; camp and tramp with him in the Mojave Desert;
tarry awhile in Southern California; then visit Yosemite before
embarking on the Pacific preparatory to lotus-eating in Hawaii.
The lure held out to the more obscure members of the party was
all that has been enumerated, plus that of having these two great,
simple men for traveling companions. To see the wonders of the
Southwest is in itself great good fortune, but to see them in
company with these two students of nature, and to study the
students while the students were studying the wonders, was an
incalculable privilege.

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