would comment while going about the home-farm in later years.

The poetry of rural life — bee-culture, any fancy strain in sheep or poultry appealed to both Hiram and John. As boys they used to hang around a certain neighbor's yard where some chickens with specially large top-knots filled their eyes: 'If I had not taken this tendency out in running after wild Nature and writing about her,' said Mr. Burroughs, 'I should probably have been a bee-man, or a fancy-stock farmer.... The top-knot was the extra touch the touch of poetry that I have always looked for in things, and that Hiram, in his way, craved and sought for, too.'

Very real the gifted brother makes the obscure brother as he tells of his thwarted day-dreams- of his always wanting some plaything, such as fancy sheep or bees; of being so curious about strange lands- keeping his valise packed for years, hoping to go West; once even starting, but losing heart as soon as he got beyond sight of his native hills, the end of life's journey coming before he was again ready to go West. 'He never gazed on Carcassonne!'

One's interest deepens in this humble dreamer as his brother says: 'I see myself in Hiram . . . I have at times his vagueness, his irresolution, and want of spirit when imposed upon. My wife tells me I don't know enough to know when I am insulted.'

Eden had a cheery disposition, was methodical and industrious, and, compared to the others, punctilious in dress. 'Come and see how neat Eden keeps his barn and tool-house, and see his fine garden,' Mr. Burroughs once said to me, adding, with a twinkle in his eyes, 'You see all the family are not so slipshod as I am.' And truly the garden of Eden was a delight to behold.

In the following record, given me early in our acquaintance, Mr. Burroughs brought to the summing-up of facts concerning his family the same straight-seeing and candor that characterized his natural-history observations:

Of my family I can truly say, 'How little they knew of what is best worth knowing in the world!' How little I myself know, but how much less they knew! My brothers read no books; hardly ever looked into a newspaper, unless it were a mere local sheet, though Curtis in his old age did read the 'Signs of the Times.' They did not read in the Book of Nature which always lay open before them,

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except so far as their needs and duties compelled them to read. Curtis read the weather signs remarkably well. He was habitually glancing up at the sky, and could forecast the weather better than I could. He did not see well, but seemed to carry a barometer in his sense of feeling. Hiram had some bee-lore, and an eye for sled-crooks in trees, yes, and for cradle-fingers. He knew the ways of foxes, as did Eden, he had hunted them so much. None of them were good anglers, or very good farmers, though Father was a first-rate farmer.

Mother, I think, never read a page of anything. Olly Ann had some schooling, but I do not know that she ever read a book; the same with Jane. Abigail was better informed, still she read but little.

Father always took a weekly Albany paper, and would read the Governor's message and comment upon it. Later he took the N.Y. Journal of Commerce. This gave him the markets. He also read his religious paper diligently.

Learning did not come easy to any of us, though Father used to tell his friends, 'John takes to larnin'.' I 'took' fairly well to mathematics (but I never conquered the higher mathematics), and to the ordinary country-school courses; but languages came hard to me, and the feeble attempts I made at Latin and French, during my two terms in the seminaries, resulted in little. I always read the best books of English literature eagerly, but I could never acquire any of the marks or accomplishments of a scholar. Learned names and references and bookish airs would not stick to me. I got much out of books, but not what the schools and colleges give. I lack the pride of scholarly accomplishments. My farmer ancestry rules me in this respect. I am my father and brothers with more culture, but with the same awkwardness and fumbling incompetence in all bookish matters. Perhaps I should say that it is the technical part of literature and science that I fail in. My natural-history knowledge is more like that of the hunter and trapper than like that of the real scientist. I know our birds well, but not as the professional ornithologist knows them. I know them through my heart more than through my head. It is hard for me to remember arbitrary names and technical facts. Those full and ready men who can talk as if out of an encyclopædia - how I envy them! Edison, for instance, can talk chemistry as if out of a text-book....

We are weak as men. We do not make ourselves felt in the community; we are below the average in those qualities and powers which make for worldly success; but this very weakness is a help to me as a writer upon Nature . . . that which hinders me with men, makes me strong with impersonal Nature.

Among these brothers and sisters, in these humble scenes, John Burroughs grew up and reached out for the things his spirit craved, finding them in Nature and in books. His family's lack of interest, and, for the most part, of compre

hension, in what made up his real life, accounts for his habitual reluctance to mention his writings at home. 'It was not natural,' he said with unconscious pathos, 'to speak of them among my kinsfolk.' Still, instead of blaming his kin for lack of sympathy, he excused them, saying, 'I sometimes have a half-guilty feeling that I unwittingly robbed them of part of their heritage - Nature gave the lion's share to me.' Or, to quote his brother Eden, 'They give John all the brains there wa'n't none left for the rest of us.' Intellectual isolation from them, however, seemed only to deepen his yearning:

They can value in me only what I have in common with them, which is, no doubt, the larger part of me. But I love them just the same. They are a part of Father and Mother, of the Old Home, and of my youthful days.

His upbringing amid rural scenes, and with unlettered persons, accounts for John Burroughs better than one might at first think. To the fact that he had few books and plenty of real things is due that sense of reality and unbookishness in his work. The homely life of the farm seems to have been best calculated to develop that kinship with Nature which enabled him to translate her language into the language of human thought and affection. And yet his father was a farmboy, and his father before him, likewise his brothers, and they all remained humdrum toilers, callous to beauty, devoid of interest either in Nature or in books. Clearly one must seek further to account for the writer we know. True, his maternal grandfather, and his mother, inarticulate as they were, had the stuff of poetry in their souls. Nature drew them as she did him. Still it requires something more than the factors of his ancestry and environment, favorable as was the latter in natural things, to account for him; for, as George Eliot says, the selfish instincts are not subdued by the sight of buttercups, nor is integrity established by the classical rural occupation, sheep-washing; and to make men moral something more is requisite than to turn them out to grass. Something more than turning them out to grass is likewise required to make them devotees of Nature, and literary artists as well; a something more, which, in the case of John Burroughs, was the gift of genius. Deep into his native soil he struck his roots; he drew his breath from the clear mountain air, and drank at peren

nial springs; and much of soil, air, and water entered into him, causing him to an unusual degree to think with and from his environment; causing, too, his heart to throb with ancestral emotion; but 'the little more and how much it is!'-rooted him deep in the life of the universe, and gave him insight into the great elemental truths. Thus, linked as he was to the common, homely life about him, and hampered by its limitations, this 'something more' linked him also to the cosmic and the universal.

CHAPTER II

THE FARM-BOY

1837-1854

There was a child went forth every day,

And the first object he looked upon, that object he became,

And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day,
Or for many years. . . .

The early lilacs became part of the child,

And grass, and white and red morning-glories, and white and red clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird,

And the Third month's lambs, and the sow's pink-faint litter, and the mare's foal, and the cow's calf,

And the noisy brood of the barnyard or by the mire of the pond-side,

And the fish suspending themselves so curiously below here, and the beautiful

curious liquid,

And the water-plants with their graceful flat heads - all became a part of him.
WHITMAN

THE pastoral region where John Burroughs spent the first seventeen years of his life invites to further acquaintance as one learns how deep a hold it had upon his affections, how much it shaped his character and influenced his work. 'I was the Child that went forth,' he once wrote me, 'and every object I looked upon, with pity or love or dread, that object I became, and that object became a part of me; and it is still true in a measure.' This susceptibility and plasticity which characterized boy and man account for the degree to which he became so fused and blended with nature that rural things were bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. 'Take that farm-boy out of my books,' he has said, 'and you have robbed them of something vital and fundamental.'

The rural district around Roxbury has been from its earliest settlement a dairy country — milk and butter being its chief marketable products. In the absence of railroads, the fifty miles from the Hudson River made a concentrated product necessary. Only the cream of the land, so to speak, could be sent to market; hence butter was the one dependable commodity. All the energies of the farm were turned to its production, and the cow and her needs became the ruling factor in country life. She was, in truth, the 'rural divinity.' The soft, cold, delicious water flowing from every dimple in the