Our Friend John Burroughs

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He made a great deal of noise about the farm, sending his voice
over the hills (we could hear him calling us to dinner when we
were working on the "Rundle Place," half a mile away), shouting at
the cows, the pigs, the sheep, or calling the dog, with needless
expenditure of vocal power at all times and seasons. The neighbors
knew when Father was at home; so did the cattle in the remotest
field. His bark was always to be dreaded more than his bite.
His threats of punishment were loud and severe, but the punishment
rarely came. Never but once did he take a gad to me, and then the
sound was more than the substance. I deserved more than I got: I
had let a cow run through the tall grass in the meadow when I might
easily have "headed her off," as I was told to do. Father used to
say "No," to our requests for favors (such as a day off to go
fishing or hunting) with strong emphasis, and then yield to our
persistent coaxing.

One day I was going to town and asked him for money to buy an
algebra. "What is an algebra?" He had never heard of an algebra,
and couldn't see why I needed one; he refused the money, though I
coaxed and Mother pleaded with him. I had left the house and had
got as far as the big hill up there by the pennyroyal rock, when he
halloed to me that I might get the algebra--Mother had evidently
been instrumental in bringing him to terms. But my blood was up by
this time, and as I trudged along to the village I determined to
wait until I could earn the money myself for the algebra, and some
other books I coveted. I boiled sap and made maple-sugar, and the
books were all the sweeter by reason of the maple-sugar money.

When I wanted help, as I did two or three times later, on a pinch.
Father refused me; and, as it turned out, I was the only one of his
children that could or would help him when the pinch came--a curious
retribution, but one that gave me pleasure and him no pain. I was
better unhelped, as it proved, and better for all I could help him.
But he was a loving father all the same. He couldn't understand my
needs, but love outweighs understanding.

He did not like my tendency to books; he was afraid, as I learned
later, that I would become a Methodist minister--his pet aversion.
He never had much faith in me--less than in any of his children; he
doubted if I would ever amount to anything. He saw that I was an
odd one, and had tendencies and tastes that he did not sympathize
with. He never alluded to my literary work; apparently left it out
of his estimate of me. My aims and aspirations were a sealed book
to him, as his peculiar religious experiences were to me, yet I
reckon it was the same leaven working in us both.

I remember, on my return from Dr. Holmes's seventieth birthday
breakfast, in 1879, a remark of father's. He had overheard me
telling sister Abigail about the breakfast, and he declared: "I
had rather go to hear old Elder Jim Mead preach two hours, if he
was living, than attend all the fancy parties in the world." He
said he had heard him preach when he did not know whether he was
in the body or out of the body. The elder undoubtedly had a strong
natural eloquence.

Although Father never spoke to me of my writings, Abigail once told
me that when she showed him a magazine with some article of mine in,
and accompanied by a photograph of me, he looked at it a long time;
he said nothing, but his eyes filled with tears.

He went to school to the father of Jay Gould, John Gould--the first
child born in the town of Roxbury (about 1780 or 1790).

He married Amy Kelly, my mother, in 1827. He was six years her
senior. She lived over in Red Kill where he had taught school,
and was one of his pupils. I have often heard him say: "I rode
your Uncle Martin's old sorrel mare over to her folks' when I went
courting her." When he would be affectionate toward her before
others, Mother would say, "Now, Chauncey, don't be foolish."

Father bought the farm of 'Riah Bartram's mother, and moved on it
in 1827. In a house that stood where the Old Home does now, I was
born, April 3, 1837. It was a frame house with three or four rooms
below and one room "done off" above, and a big chamber. I was the
fifth son and the seventh child of my parents.

[Illustration: Birthplace of John Burroughs, Roxbury, New York.
From a photograph by Charles S. Olcott]

Mother was in her twenty-ninth year when she was carrying me.
She had already borne four boys and two girls; her health was
good and her life, like that of all farmers' wives in that section,
was a laborious one. I can see her going about her work--milking,
butter-making, washing, cooking, berry-picking, sugar-making,
sewing, knitting, mending, and the thousand duties that fell to her
lot and filled her days. Both she and Father were up at daylight in
summer, and before daylight in winter. Sometimes she had help in
the kitchen, but oftener she did not. The work that housewives did
in those times seems incredible. They made their own soap, sugar,
cheese, dipped or moulded their candles, spun the flax and wool and
wove it into cloth, made carpets, knit the socks and mittens and
"comforts" for the family, dried apples, pumpkins, and berries,
and made the preserves and pickles for home use.

Mother went about all these duties with cheerfulness and alacrity.
She more than kept up her end of the farm work. She was more
strenuous than father. How many hours she sat up mending and
patching our clothes, while we were sleeping! Rainy days meant
no let-up in her work, as they did in Father's.

The first suit of clothes I remember having, she cut and made.
Then the quilts and coverlids she pieced and quilted! We used, too,
in my boyhood to make over two tons of butter annually, the care of
which devolved mainly upon her, from the skimming of the pans to the
packing of the butter in the tubs and firkins, though the churning
was commonly done by a sheep or a dog. We made our own cheese,
also. As a boy I used to help do the wheying, and I took toll out
of the sweet curd. One morning I ate so much of the curd that I
was completely cloyed, and could eat none after that.

I can remember Mother's loom pounding away hour after hour in the
chamber of an outbuilding where she was weaving a carpet, or cloth.
I used to help do some of the quilling--running the yarn or linen
thread upon spools to be used in the shuttles. The distaff, the
quill-wheel, the spinning-wheel, the reel, were very familiar to me
as a boy; so was the crackle, the swingle, the hetchel, for Father
grew flax which Mother spun into thread and wove into cloth for our
shirts and summer trousers, and for towels and sheets. Wearing
those shirts, when new, made a boy's skin pretty red. I dare say
they were quite equal to a hair shirt to do penance in; and wiping
on a new home-made linen towel suggested wiping on a brier bush.
Dear me! how long it has been since I have seen any tow, or heard
a loom or a spinning-wheel, or seen a boy breaking in his new
flax-made shirt! No one sees these things any more.

Mother had but little schooling; she learned to read, but not to
write or cipher; hence, books and such interests took none of her
time. She was one of those uneducated countrywomen of strong
natural traits and wholesome instincts, devoted to her children; she
bore ten, and nursed them all--an heroic worker, a helpful neighbor,
and a provident housewife, with the virtues that belonged to so many
farmers' wives in those days, and which we are all glad to be able
to enumerate in our mothers.

She had not a large frame, but was stout; had brown hair and blue
eyes, a fine strong brow, and a straight nose with a strong bridge
to it. She was a woman of great emotional capacity, who felt more
than she thought. She scolded a good deal, but was not especially
quick-tempered. She was an Old-School Baptist, as was Father.

She was not of a vivacious or sunny disposition--always a little
in shadow, as it seems to me now, given to brooding and to dwelling
upon the more serious aspects of life. How little she knew of
all that has been done and thought in the world! and yet the
burden of it all was, in a way, laid upon her. The seriousness
of Revolutionary times, out of which came her father and mother,
was no doubt reflected in her own serious disposition. As I have
said, her happiness was always shaded, never in a strong light; and
the sadness which motherhood, and the care of a large family, and a
yearning heart beget was upon her. I see myself in her perpetually.
A longing which nothing can satisfy I share with her. Whatever is
most valuable in my books comes from her--the background of feeling,
of pity, of love comes from her.

She was of a very different temperament from Father--much more
self-conscious, of a more breeding, inarticulate nature. She was
richly endowed with all the womanly instincts and affections. She
had a decided preference for Abigail and me among her children,
wanted me to go to school, and was always interceding with Father
to get me books. She never read one of my books. She died in 1880,
at the age of seventy-three. I had published four of my books then.

She had had a stroke of apoplexy in the fall of 1879, but lived till
December of the following year, dying on father's seventy-seventh
birthday. (He lived four years more.) We could understand but
little of what she said after she was taken ill. She used to repeat
a line from an old hymn--"Only a veil between."

She thought a good deal of some verses I wrote--"My Brother's
Farm"--and had them framed. (You have seen them in the parlor at
the Old Home. I wrote them in Washington the fall that you were
born. I was sick and forlorn at the time.)

I owe to Mother my temperament, my love of nature, my brooding,
introspective habit of mind--all those things which in a literary
man help to give atmosphere to his work. In her line were dreamers
and fishermen and hunters. One of her uncles lived alone in a little
house in the woods. His hut was doubtless the original Slabsides.
Grandfather Kelly was a lover of solitude, as all dreamers are, and
Mother's happiest days, I think, were those spent in the fields after
berries. The Celtic element, which I get mostly from her side, has
no doubt played an important part in my life. My idealism, my romantic
tendencies, are largely her gift.

On my father's side I find no fishermen or hermits or dreamers. I
find a marked religious strain, more active and outspoken than on
Mother's. The religion of the Kellys was, for the most part, of the
silent, meditative kind, but there are preachers and teachers and
scholars on Father's side--one of them, Stephen Burroughs (b. 1765),
a renegade preacher. Doubtless most of my own intellectual impetus
comes from this side of the family. There are also cousins and
second cousins on this side who became preachers, and some who
became physicians, but I recall none on the Kelly side.

In size and physical make-up I am much like my father. I have my
father's foot, and I detect many of his ways in my own. My loud and
harmless barking, when I am angered, I get from him. The Kellys are
more apt to bite. I see myself, too, in my brothers, in their looks
and especially in their weaknesses. Take from me my special
intellectual equipment, and I am in all else one of them.

[Speaking of their characteristics as a family, Mr. Burroughs says
that they have absolute inability to harbor resentment (a Celtic
trait); that they never have "cheek" to ask enough for what they
have to sell, lack decision, and are easily turned from their
purpose. Commenting on this, he has often said: "We are weak as
men--do not make ourselves felt in the community. But this very
weakness is a help to me as a writer upon Nature. I don't stand in
my own light. I get very close to bird and beast. My thin skin
lets the shy and delicate influences pass. I can surrender myself
to Nature without effort. I am like her. . . . That which hinders
me with men, makes me strong with impersonal Nature, and admits me
to her influences. . . . I am lacking in moral fibre, but am tender
and sympathetic."]

To see Mr. Burroughs stand and fondly gaze upon the fruitful,
well-cultivated fields that his father had cared for so many years,
to hear him say that the hills are like father and mother to him,
was to realize how strong is the filial instinct in him--that and
the home feeling. As he stood on the crest of the big hill by the
pennyroyal rock, looking down on the peaceful homestead in the
soft light of a midsummer afternoon, his eye roamed fondly over
the scene:--

"How fertile and fruitful it is now, but how lonely and bleak the
old place looked in that winter landscape the night I drove up from
the station in the moonlight after hearing of Father's death! There
was a light in the window, but I knew Father would not meet me at
the door this time--beleaguering winter without, and Death within!

"Father and Mother! I think of them with inexpressible love and
yearning, wrapped in their last eternal sleep. They had, for them,
the true religion, the religion of serious, simple, hard-working.
God-fearing lives. To believe as they did, to sit in their pews, is
impossible to me--the Time-Spirit has decreed otherwise; but all I
am or can be or achieve is to emulate their virtues--my soul can be
saved only by a like truthfulness and sincerity."

The following data concerning his brothers and sisters were given
me by Mr. Burroughs in conversation:--

Hiram, born in 1827, was an unpractical man and a dreamer; he was
a bee-keeper. He showed great aptitude in the use of tools, could
make axe-handles, neck-yokes, and the various things used about
the farm, and was especially skilled in building stone walls.
But he could not elbow his way in a crowd, could not make farming
pay, and was always pushed to the wall. He cared nothing for
books, and although he studied grammar when a boy, and could
parse, he never could write a grammatical sentence. He died at
the age of seventy-five.

Olly Ann was about two years younger than Hiram. Mr. Burroughs
remembers her as a frail, pretty girl, with dark-brown eyes, a high
forehead, and a wasp-like waist. She had a fair education for her
time, married and had two children, and died in early womanhood of
phthisis.

Wilson was a farmer, thrifty and economical. He married but had no
children. He was evidently somewhat neurotic; as a child, even when
well, he would groan and moan in his sleep, and he died, at the age
of twenty-eight, after a short illness, of a delirious fever.

Curtis also was a farmer, but lacked judgment; could not look ahead;
thought if he gave his note a debt was canceled, and went on piling
up other indebtedness. He had a very meagre schooling, but was apt
at witty remarks. He was temperate; was much given to reading "The
Signs of the Times," like his father before him. He married and had
five children. For many years previous to his death he lived at the
homestead, dying there in his eightieth year, in the summer of 1912.
Two of his unmarried children still live at the Old Home,--of all
places on the earth the one toward which Mr. Burroughs turns with
the most yearning fondness.

Edmund died in infancy.

Jane, a tender-hearted, old-fashioned woman, who cried and fretted
easily, and worried over trifles, was a good housekeeper, and a
fond mother--a fat, dumpy little woman with a doleful voice. She
was always urging her brother not to puzzle his head about writing;
writing and thinking, she said, were "bad for the head." When
he would go away on a journey of only a hundred miles, she would
worry incessantly lest something happen to him. She married and
had five daughters. Her death occurred in May, 1912, at the age
of seventy-seven. "Poor Jane!" said Mr. Burroughs one day, when
referring to her protests against his writing; "I fear she never
read a dozen printed words of mine--or shall I say 'lucky Jane'?"

John, born in 1837, was always "an odd one." (One is reminded
of what William R. Thayer said of the Franklin family: "Among
the seventeen Franklin children one was a Benjamin, and the
rest nobodies.")

Eden was born in 1839. Frail most of his life, in later years he
has become robust, and now (1913) is the only surviving member of
the family besides Mr. Burroughs. He is cheery and loquacious,
methodical and orderly, and very punctilious in dress. (One day, in
the summer of 1912, when he was calling at "Woodchuck Lodge,"--the
summer home where Mr. Burroughs has lived of late years, near the
old place where he was born,--this brother recounted some of their
youthful exploits, especially the one which yielded the material for
the essay "A White Day and a Red Fox." "I shot the fox and got five
dollars for it," said Mr. Eden Burroughs, "and John wrote a piece
about it, and got seventy-five.")

Abigail, the favorite sister of our author, appreciated her
brother's books and his ideals more than any other member of the
family. She married and had two children. At the time of her
death, in 1901, of typhoid fever (at the age of fifty-eight) the
band of brothers and sisters had been unbroken by death for more
than thirty-seven years. Her loss was a severe blow to her brother.
He had always shared his windfalls with her; she had read some of
his essays, and used to talk with him about his aspirations,
encouraging him timidly, before he had gained recognition.

Eveline died at the age of five years.

The death of his brother Hiram, in 1904, made the past bleed
afresh for Mr. Burroughs. "He was next to Father and Mother in my
affections," he wrote. "Oh! if I had only done more for him--this
is my constant thought. If I could only have another chance! How
generous death makes us! Go, then, and make up by doing more for
the living."

As I walked with him about the Old Home, he said, "I can see Hiram
in everything here; in the trees he planted and grafted, in these
stone walls he built, in this land he so industriously cultivated
during the years he had the farm."

So large a place in his affections did this brother hold, and yet
how wide apart were these two in their real lives! I know of no
one who has pictured the pathos of lives so near and yet so far
apart as has George Eliot when she says: "Family likeness has
often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist,
knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler
web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsion, and ties us by our
heart-strings to the beings that jar us at every moment. We hear
a voice with the very cadence of our own uttering the thoughts we
despise; we see eyes--ah! so like our mother's--averted from us in
cold alienation."

We cannot tell why one boy in a family turns out a genius, while
the others stay in the ancestral ruts and lead humdrum, placid
lives, any more than we can tell why one group of the hepaticas we
gather in the April woods has the gift of fragrance, while those
of a sister group in the same vicinity are scentless. A caprice of
fate, surely, that "mate and mate beget such different issues."

"Hiram was with me at Slabsides," said Mr. Burroughs, "much of the
time when I was writing the Whitman book, but never referred to it
in any way. When it came from the press, I said to him, 'Hiram,
here is the book you have heard me speak about as having cost me
nearly four years' work, and which I rewrote four times.'"

"'That's the book, is it?' he replied, showing no curiosity about it,
or desire to look into it, but kept drumming on the table--a habit
of his that was very annoying to me at times, but of which he was
not aware. When 'A Year in the Fields' came out, he looked at some
of the pictures, but that was all."

There is something very pathetic in all this--these two brothers
living in that isolated cabin in the woods, knit together by the
ties of kinship, having in common a deep and yearning love for
each other, and for the Old Home in the Catskills,--their daily
down-sittings and up-risings outwardly the same, yet so alienated
in what makes up one's real existence. The one, the elder, intent
on his bees, his thoughts by day revolving about his hives, or
concerned with the weather and the daily happenings; at night, as
he idly drums with his fingers, dreaming of the old days on the
farm--of how he used to dig out rocks to build the fences, of the
sugar-making, of cradling the oats in July; while the other--ah!
the other, of what was he not thinking!--of the little world of the
hives (his thoughts yielding the exquisite "Idyl of the Honey-Bee"),
of boyhood days upon the farm, of the wild life around his cabin, of
the universe, and of the soul of the poet Whitman, that then much
misunderstood man, than whom no one so much as he has helped us to
appreciate. Going out and in, attending to his homely tasks (for
these brothers did their own housework), the younger brother was
all the time thinking of that great soul, of all that association
with him had meant to him, and of all that Whitman would mean to
America, to the world, as poet, prophet, seer--thinking how out of
his knowledge of Whitman as poet and person he could cull and sift
and gather together an adequate and worthy estimate of one whom his
soul loved as Jonathan loved David!

The mystery of personality--how shall one fathom it? I asked myself
this one rainy afternoon, as I sat in the Burroughs homestead and
looked from one brother to another, the two so alike and yet so
unlike. The one a simple farmer whose interests are circumscribed
by the hills which surround the farm on which as children they were
reared; the other, whose interests in the early years were seemingly
just as circumscribed, but who felt that nameless something--that
push from within--which first found its outlet in a deeper interest
in the life about him than his brothers ever knew; and who later
felt the magic of the world of books; and, still later, the need of
expression, an expression which finally showed itself in a masterly
interpretation of country life and experiences. The same heredity
here, the same environment, the same opportunities--yet how different
the result! The farmer has tended and gathered many a crop from the
old place since they were boys, but has been blind and deaf to all
that has there yielded such a harvest to the other. That other,
a plain, unassuming man, "standing at ease in nature," has become
a household word because of all that he has contributed to our
intellectual and emotional life.

A man who as a lad had roamed the Roxbury hills with John Burroughs
and his brothers, and had known the boy John as something of a
dreamer, and thought of him in later years as perhaps of less account
than his brothers (since they had settled down, owned land, and were
leading industrious lives), was traveling in Europe in the eighties.
On the top of a stage-coach in the Scottish Highlands he sat next a
scholarly-looking man whose garb, he thought, betokened a priest.
From some question which the traveler put, the Englishman learned
that the stranger was from America. Immediately he showed a lively
interest. "From America! Do you, then, know John Burroughs?"

Imagine the surprise of the Delaware County farmer at being
questioned about his schoolmate, the dreamer, who, to be sure,
"took to books"; but what was he that this Englishman should
inquire about him as the one man in America he was eager to learn
about! Doubtless Mr. Burroughs was the one literary man the
Delaware County farmer did know, though his knowledge was on the
personal and not on the literary side. And imagine the surprise of
the priest (if priest it was) to find that he had actually lighted
upon a schoolmate of the author!--C. B.]

CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH

I seem to have been a healthy, active child, very impressionable,
and with more interests and a keener enjoyment of things than most
farm boys have. I was fond of the girls back as early as I can
remember, and had my sweethearts at a very early age. . . .

I learned my letters at school, when I was five or six, in the
old-fashioned way by being called up to the teacher several times
a day and naming the letters as he pointed at them where they stood
in a perpendicular column in Cobb's Spelling-Book. The vowels and
consonants stood in separate columns, and had to be learned one by
one, by continued repetition. It took me a long time, I remember,
to distinguish /b/ from /d/, and /c/ from /e/. When and how I learned to
read I do not remember. I recall Cobb's Second Reader, and later
Olney's Geography, and then Dayballs Arithmetic.

I went to school summers till I was old enough to help on the farm,
say at the age of eleven or twelve, when my schooling was confined
to the winters.

[Illustration: The Old Schoolhouse, Roxbury, New York. From a
photograph by M.H. Fanning]

As a boy, the only farm work that appealed to me was sugar-making in
the maple woods in spring. This I thoroughly enjoyed. It brought
me near to wild nature and was freer from routine than other farm
work. Then I soon managed to gather a little harvest of my own from
the sugar bush. I used to anticipate the general tapping by a
few days or a week, and tap a few trees on my own account along
the sunny border of the Woods, and boil the sap down on the kitchen
stove (to the disgust of the womenfolks), selling the sugar in the
village. I think the first money I ever earned came to me in this
way. My first algebra and first grammar I bought with some of this
precious money. When I appeared in the village with my basket of
small cakes of early sugar, how my customers would hail me and call
after me! No one else made such white sugar, or got it to market so
early. One season, I remember, I got twelve silver quarters for
sugar, and I carried them in my pockets for weeks, jingling them in
the face of my envious schoolmates, and at intervals feasting my own
eyes upon them. I fear if I could ever again get hold of such money
as that was I should become a miser.

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