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turnpike, thence journeying by stage-coach to Olive, in the county of Ulster.

In painful embarrassment, not knowing what was expected of him, the youth awaited the arrival of the old Concord coach; but when, his fare paid, and his name entered on the waybill, he heard the driver say, 'Climb to the top, boy!' he obeyed nimbly, his heart beating tumultuously.

Dr. Abram Hull, a friend of his parents, drove him about the country, and after a few days he found a school in need of a teacher. Obtaining from the trustee a half-promise, he returned home to await his decision, which came in a week's time. He was to come immediately: wages eleven dollars a month and 'board round.' (In advanced age he could still visualize the handwriting of that momentous summons.)

Now came the real leave-taking. Up before daylight, a hurried, silent breakfast, the lunch put up, the good-byes said (the mother concealing as best she could her anxiety her boy John was going out into the world alone -), the agitated youth, with a wistful look at the group on the door-stone, climbed to the spring-seat beside his father, and away they drove to Dimmick's Corners' to meet the 'stage.' More confident now, he mounted the old coach, being set down in time at Shokan, whence he walked the few miles to Tongore, in the town of Olive.

Already homesick for his native hills, the familiar sound of the peepers, piping in the April twilight, made him forlorn. When, a child of four on his first journey from the hearthstone, he had looked back on reaching the turn in the road, and had seen how far he was from home, he had run back as fast as his legs could carry him. Now there could be no turning back. He must push on, wherever the road led.

Far into the night, awake, amid the strange surroundings, his brain teemed with plans. There came a new conception of himself, a more positive self-feeling, as he thought of his responsibilities as a teacher. Day-dreams must yield to actualities. With the unusual stirring of mental powers came a vague prescience of the place he would one day make for himself. Finally, wearied, he fell asleep, the shrill, insistent voices of the peepers sounding through his dreams.

He awoke in a different world. Wistfully he thought of the home amid the hills, but the Future beckoned.

'Now Arkville.

CHAPTER III

THE WRITER IN EMBRYO

1854-1863

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance, that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed upon that plot of ground which is given him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know it until he has tried.

EMERSON

Or the next epoch in the life of John Burroughs, the period from 1854 till the close of 1863, he declared that little need be said: 'I could say very little myself. I was reading and thinking and trying to get hold of myself. I suppose I was growing all the time.'

Of his growth one may be assured; it may even seem, as one learns more of this obscure decade, that it was one of the most significant in his career - not so much in outward events, although some of these, since they influenced the whole course of his life, were of great import; but more especially in things which contributed to his mental and spiritual development. It was a period during which the main lines of his character were formed and his tendencies fixed. From his books one can gather the manner of man he was after beginning to take his place in literature, but to learn how he reached that place, it is needful to trace his development in later adolescence, when, through deepening emotions, and surer mental grasp, he linked his earlier experiences (the farm-boy's precious mine of senseimpressions) with dawning powers, and began consciously to realize the unity of thought, feeling, and will which enabled him to pursue unremittingly the somewhat rough path that led to his goal.

I. SCHOOL-KEEPING AND EARLY STRUGGLES

A crude, callow youth, obtuse, with no social aptitude; given to stuttering when embarrassed; undisciplined, uninformed, yet full of vague and tremulous aspirations and awakenings is his description of himself at this period.

It was natural that any boy in Delaware county who was ambitious should go down to Ulster county and teach school. It had been the custom for years. The Ulster trustees looked to the Delaware boys to apply. It was the obvious way to earn money, if you did not want to stay on the farm. Some of our boys went to New Jersey to teach. I followed their example in both cases, going first to Tongore.

He read but little that year, and had then no conscious interest in Nature. Years later he was unable to recall how he had spent his leisure — the alternate Saturdays when no school was kept, which, a year later, he spent in roaming the woods. He could recall the names and faces of his pupils, and certain experiences in boarding 'round, and said in looking back upon the time he seemed to see sunshine over all.

As to my teaching, I had a good faculty for imparting knowledge; but I was not a good disciplinarian. I couldn't be rigid enough. Still, I always got the good will of the children and governed in that way.... There I spent the first days away from the parental roof. It seems as if some beloved son of mine had taught that school so long ago.

An eclipse of the sun in May, at corn-planting time, is one of his outstanding recollections; another, the purchase from a peddler of a 'Complete Letter-Writer,' which he used in framing a letter of condolence to his parents when Gran'ther Kelly died (in after years he fairly cringed at the thought of it); and his first letter to Mary Taft, his Roxbury sweetheart, 'a preposterous letter,' the first sentence of which was:

DEAR MADAM,

It was a question among the Stoics whether the whole of human life afforded more pleasure, or more pain.

Mary's answer, written on a tiny embossed sheet, addressed to her 'absent but not forgotten friend,' began:

I at last find myself in the attitude to address a few scattered thoughts to you through the medium of the pen.

It would be interesting to know what the attitude was in which Mary found herself just after reading that Stoical beginning by her correspondent.

That summer, coming upon a book on Phrenology, by Fowler and Wells, our youth regarded it as highly scientific

because of its initial statement that everything springs from an egg. The book engendered an interest in phrenology and physiognomy which lasted many years. In fact, even in advanced age, although his later knowledge precluded adherence to those early-held theories, his estimate of new acquaintances was considerably influenced by rules laid down by those pseudo-scientists. Subsequently buying Gall and Spruzheim, and subscribing to a phrenological journal, he also expended a dollar and a half of his scanty savings for a chart of his head; and when he began to write, one of his earliest efforts, as seen in a note-book dated 1853-54, was a defense of phrenology.

Partly my own, I suppose, and partly from the Phrenological Journal. I must have been trying to string those sentences togetherpoor, high-flown stuff! I had no ideas, and was just playing with words, you see. I suppose that is the way many begin to write.

Jealously hoarding the most of his earnings, he carried home fifty dollars that October, which, with what he earned on the farm, paid his way for five months at the Ashland Collegiate Institute, Greene County, New York. It was the first year of the school's life. Two hundred students were in attendance. Algebra, geometry, chemistry, French, logic, composition-writing, and declamation were the requirements. His teacher in logic was a delicate, wide-eyed young man who later became prominent in the Methodist Church as Bishop Hearst.

Our student chose logic because he had never heard of it before. The girl classmates elected Wayland's Moral Philosophy instead; and something of the youth's unflattering opinion of girls' minds, and moral philosophy as well, lingered in tone and expression when telling of it. They parsed from 'Paradise Lost.' Astonished at the celestial warfare there described, the youth announced to a classmate that he credited no word of it - a confession which gave the maiden pause, and to which she referred in later years when corresponding about his essays on science versus theology.

At Ashland, only one other in the class excelled him in composition. In a debate on the Crimean War, he took the side of England and France against Russia, and came off with flying colors, having got his ammunition from 'Harper's

Magazine'; but his co-debater found himself up a stump when his turn came, having levied on the same source.

After the term at Ashland the student had to earn more money before indulging in another educational orgy, so, with ten dollars advanced by his father, he started for New Jersey in quest of a school, taking his first ride on a steamboat from Kingston to Jersey City, and his first on the steam cars from there to Plainfield, wondering, as he boarded the train, if the engine would start so suddenly as to jerk off his hat!

After walking twelve miles to apply for a school, and being pronounced by the trustees 'too young and inexperienced,' crestfallen, he reluctantly engaged lodgings at the little inn; gazed long and long at the occultation of Venus by the moon, and in the morning tramped back again.

In New York, he hung wistfully around the office of Fowler and Wells, but could not summon courage to enter; but he browsed half a day among the second-hand book-stalls on William Street, oblivious to all other attractions of the city. His return ticket on the boat secure, and allowing for the stagefare to Dimmick's Corners, he decided he could walk the twelve remaining miles, and so use the rest of his money for several enticing volumes he had selected. Supper and breakfast? Yes, but see what he would have after his hunger was forgotten! So, thrusting the money into the vendor's ready hand, he packed Saint-Pierre, Locke, Johnson, and Thomas Dick into his oilcloth bag, and sought the steamer bound for Kingston.

The grass was green that twentieth day of May when he crossed Batavia Mountain with his heavy load of books, but 'the air was full of the great goose-feather snowflakes which sometimes fall in late May' — always, always, he remembers the face of the day and the mood of Nature, in connection with significant experiences.

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In one of his note-books, the fly-leaf of which bears the date 1855, is a list of seventy-nine books (or, in some cases, an author's entire works), with the heading, 'Books I will read.' Some of these have the prices affixed. Some names have a line drawn through them, the first, with the date 1854, presumably indicating that he had already read that. But this can hardly be the case with the Encyclopædia Britannica, so marked.

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