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up there also? A few of us might form a little community up there and get some satisfaction out of our summer vacations in a simple and rational way. There is health and long life amid those mountains. The Adirondacks are too far and too expensive.

Nothing very eventful has happened to me since I wrote you on my birthday last April. I have had a few bright days, many gray ones and a few dark ones. I fear I have not grown much in grace nor much in wisdom. I have sent to market twenty tons of grapes, and about two ounces of manuscript.

[Journal] 13. Never a morning does Julian start off for school but I long to go with him, to be his mate and equal; to share his enthusiasms, his anticipations; his games, his fun. Oh, to see life through his eyes again! How young the world is to him, how untried, how enticing! How he enjoys his holidays! On his last holiday, as he sat eating his breakfast, he said, 'How glad I am it is this morning, and not tonight!' The whole day with all its possibilities was before him. When he came back at night after his long tramp, without any game, he was still excited and happy over what he might have seen, or might have got, had there not been any if in the way. Ah! the happy boy!

29. New book ['Riverby'] came today. Doubtless the last of my out-door series [sic]. I look it over with a sigh. For a quarter of a century I have been writing these books-living them first, and then writing them out. What serene joy I have had in gathering this honey! And now I begin to feel that it is about over with me. My interest, my curiosity, are getting blunted.

In 'The Halcyon in Canada' ('Locusts and Wild Honey'), he said that the French Canadians call the white-throat la siffleur; but on being set right by Dr. van Dyke (who wrote him that that term is used for the hawk, the white-throat being called le rossignol), he replied as follows: '

You could not please me better than by saying my books are true; their truthfulness is the one quality I am sure of. That you love them, and can read them in the woods, is good evidence that they have other qualities also. You know what literature is, and have made the article yourself and I trust will make much more.

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I am glad to hear you have climbed Slide. I wish you had been with me there last July. I passed a night alone on the summit had the whole universe to myself. A big storm came up and I could look squarely into the thunder-cloud and see the bo[l]ts forged.

Thank you for setting me right about the white-throat. I should have asked more persons about it. It is very pleasant to hear the Canadians have bestowed so fond a title upon it. Two years ago I

'This and other letters from J. B. to H. v. D. are kindly lent by Dr. van Dyke.

found the bird in full song in the Catskills near Onteora Park in the month of July. Of course it breeds there. Just now I see the fox sparrow on the snow in front of my window. It is a wonderful songster, and more of a whistler than the white-throat.

Sir Arthur (then Mr.) Conan Doyle is thus characterized after he meets him in New York:

A large, hearty John Bull, plain features, but a good healthy, fresh, boyish nature. Liked him much. Mr. Mabie presided with his usual skill. Of the speakers I was most drawn to Mr. Frost, president of some college in Kentucky — plain, earnest, native, good vanity, no attempt at oratory, excellent.

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Early in the new year, chiding himself for not having attended the Stevenson Memorial meeting, the journalist thus comments on R. L. S.:

His death fills quite a space in my thoughts. He seems nearer to me than any other contemporary British man of letters — of the younger school.

Some one has said, 'Be an artist, or prepare for oblivion.' Stevenson was an artist, and he is safe from oblivion, for a time at least. Yet he is not one of the great ones. His literary equipment surpasses his more solid native human equipment, as with so many of the late school of writers. He was not a man of mass and power, any more than I am. We are all light-weights, and try to make up in cleverness what we lack in scope and power.

Stevenson is not one of the men we must read. We can pass him by; but he is one of the men who fills the hour and relieves the tedium of life. He inspires love, and the thought of him as gone from life, and sleeping there in far-off Samoa on a mountain-peak, fills me with sadness.

[J. B. to L. L. P.] April 7

Your birthday greeting. warmed and cheered my heart. Your golden thoughts and wishes brought me a golden day - all sun and sky, and part of it was passed at my old home. That you were thinking of me that bright morning and wishing in my behalf, is something I like to dwell upon. It blends in with the thoughtful yearning mood that possessed me all that day. Nothing else came to me so precious as your greeting. What does life yield, anyway, to be compared with love, sympathy, appreciation? all else is dust and ashes. I reciprocate your affection and good wishes most sincerely. You are a true, tender, noble woman and I love you much. I wish and wish that I could see you oftener; that you lived near me. You would be a great comfort and help to me, and maybe I might add a ray of sunshine to your life also. I do hope our paths will intersect somewhere this summer. What fun if the Chubbs and you and I

could pitch a tent together somewhere in the Catskills in July or August!... I am hoping to hear that they want me to find them a house up here for the summer. Then surely you will come? If you do not, and I can get away, I shall come to Northampton. So swift the years fly, so soon the end comes!

... I found the robins piping and laughing here on my return, the sparrows singing, the phoebe calling, and the river free of ice. Every spring the river is born again. Its youth is immortal. The hills grow old and perish, but the river is ever renewed. I have not heard the highhole yet, nor the turtle-dove, but the fox-sparrow sang this morning, and yesterday I heard the first warbler over in the woods. I am eager to go forth with the bees and gather the first spring pollen, April pollen. How one hungers for the new bread of Nature at this time. I trust you find some of it in your walks. I am sure if I were there we could find a little of it. The pussy willows yield pollen to me before they do to the bees, and I am sure I find it in the air where they do not.

On Friday I heard the first piping frog in the wood. I think it had just woke up. In a few days now the whole clan will be gathered in the marshes, and my ear will again hear the chorus it so loves.

Well, my dear friend, spring has come again. I hope it may come to our hearts and make them bud afresh-make our friendship put out new shoots and flowers. I trust it may lighten your cares and brighten your days. I shall cherish the thought of you, and waft you good wishes from the April hill-tops.

Oh, do not wait till my birthday to write again! Every April day is my birthday.

CHAPTER XIII

THE RETREAT TO THE WOODS

1895-1899

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a-glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

W. B. YEATS

WITH the spring of 1895 a vague hope, long held by John Burroughs, began to shape toward realization. For years he had roamed the wild region in the hills a mile and more from his river home, skated the woodland pools, tracked the walkers in the snow, sought the cypripediums in the swamps and the arbutus under the hoary hemlocks, and had sighed for a lodge in that wilderness; and yet the first steps which he took toward it were seemingly foreign to the lodge - were chiefly concerned in reclaiming the wild swamp-land roundabout. He knew the rich black soil would grow superior garden produce, and when Amasa Martin, a young farmer, grew enthusiastic over the project, Burroughs advanced him the money to buy a hundred acres of the wild land, reserving for himself twenty acres of cliff and swamp, in part payment. They made a road through the woods, drained the swamp, dug out stumps, and literally skinned the land to get down to the rich black muck.

The first mention of the undertaking in the Journal appears on May 1st, when he writes of blasting out rocks in the muckswamp; and on the morrow:

All day at the swamp with George and Charley. Break through the rocky barrier today and let the water out. I lay a long time on the rocks. Shad-blow just out; little leaves the size of mouse-ears all about me. How lovely the world looks! Even Popple Town hill from my perch on the rocks looks classical. As I come home the perfume of the sugar-maple by the roadside falls upon me, sweet as apple-bloom.

On return from a visit in New York he writes characteristically to his hostess:

I am again deep in my beloved muck-swamp, but the thing fights back with poisoned sumac, so that if I were with you now, I should be compelled to look at you with only one eye, which I can assure you would be a great privation. I had rather look at you with half a dozen eyes, and even then my vision would not keep pace with my admiration. You know I like you better than a muck-swamp. I know you have no venom. You are like one of the splendid white cypripediums that often bloom above the peaty soil.

He could no more resist making a pretty speech to a pretty woman than he could withhold homage from the woodland flowers along his path.

[Journal] June 14. I do not seem to be getting much out of these June days. Every day I go to the muck-swamp; every day I listen to the birds; every day I sit in the summer-house and look long and wistfully upon the river and the landscape beyond; every day I think of Father and Mother and the Old Home; every day I wish and wish for I know not what; every day I try to read in books, but feel only a languid interest.

I think in living here I have always had the feeling of an exile. I am away from my own, though I hardly know what my own is. As nearly as I can define it, it is my family, and the Old Home. The Past, oh, the Past!

A dour stroke of fortune came to him in July when a storm of rain and hail destroyed nearly all his grapes:

[Journal.] Probably three inches of water fell in less than one halfhour. Two clouds or storms met and fought it out just over my vineyard. Each cloud apparently gutted the other, and one came down as hail, the other as rain, all in a heap. No damage done over the river, or north or west of us.

One seems to accompany him on the walk recorded August 12th:

Nearly every day I walk over to my muck-swamp for a taste of the wild.... The walk through the woods, the glimpses, the vistas, the sudden revelation of the bit of prairie surrounded by gray rocky arms; Amasa swinging his bogging-hoe in the solitude; the fat, marrowy soil; the sitting on a fern hassock, and the talk and gossip; then the spring, and the long, delicious draught repeated again and again; then the Scotch-caps and black-berries; then the slow loitering and browsing about how sweet it all is! I look away to the west and north, and there is the distant landscape with farms and wood

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