only one delay - a day and a half in the Badlands in Utah, from a washout.... The Century will print my bird poems. Fuertes has been asked to make the bird pictures. . . . November finds him and his brother resuming their quiet life at Slabslides, after he returns from a visit to the Harrimans at Arden and a jaunt to New England. Of his frequent flittings from home he writes: After a while the fires of life begin to smoulder; the ashes accumulate. Then some mild excitement is needed, some social stimulus, something to fan the coals a little. I suspect this is my case now. I need more things to enliven me. An event memorable in the annals of Slabslides is chronicled in the Journal on the last day of November - one of the three visits which Mrs. Burroughs ever made to the little cabin in the woods. Mild, still days with gleams of sunshine. Spend the day at Slabsides with Wife and Hud' and his family. Eat our dinner there and walk about. To Miss Clara Reed at Vassar College, goes this cheery December letter: I have just come over to Slabsides, have built a big fire, and am writing you in front of the leaping flame. ... You have never seen my open fire. It is a spirited affair, and puts a new face on things in a twinkling. Then, you know, I cut my own wood, and so have relations with it from the stump. I built the chimney also, and that improves the draught. I bake my potatoes in the ashes, and broil my chops over the coals, and that makes us still better acquainted. An open wood fire ventilates the mind as well as the room. All my blue devils go up the chimney with the smoke; and what sparkling spirits come down and dance and hover about the glowing embers! Just here I got up and put on some green hickory branches, and they are already beginning to sing like winter wrens. Now there comes a fine, intense, long-drawn note, like that of the English robin. There is more music in green hickory than in any other wood; but if you want fire-crackers and rockets, put on dry butternut. One wants about the same virtues in an open fire that he does in his friend – warmth, glow, music, but not too much pyrotechnic. I dislike the butternut people who, under the heat of conversation, snap and bang all the time. I trust your room-mate is birch or hickory quiet, glowing, lasting. But how I am running on about this fire! 'Hudson Covert, for twenty-three years his faithful vineyard man at Riverby. I do not stay much at Slabsides now, but come over and spend part of each day here and do some of my writing.... I am glad you like the Century article. Did you see my poem in the November Century? My first magazine poem! Of course I am proud of it. There will be one or two more. ... The closing year has this characteristic entry: To be remembered in art or literature, or in almost anything else, you must do something unique, and that no one else could do. The secret of your power lies in the breadth of your relation to mankind and to common nature; in the richness and fullness of your human endowment. But immortality is the result of something above and beyond all this; something which is your own, and must suffuse and color and shape all the rest. The universal and the special, the general and the particular, must be blended and harmonized. CHAPTER XV 'RING OUT THE OLD' 1900 What the light of your mind, which is the direct inspiration of the Almighty, pronounces incredible-that, in God's name, leave uncredited; at your, peril do not try believing that. CARLYLE MORE than six of the eight decades in the life of John Burroughs were lived in the nineteenth century. On January 1st of the closing year of the century, he bids farewell to the fleeing years: Good bye 1800 and all thy progeny! We have grown old together. Thy end has come, but I stay a little longer. I have looked upon thy face all my life. My father looked upon it all his life, my grandfather more than half of his. Now the door is shut and we shall see thee no more. Welcome to thy successor! But he is a stranger, a new-comer, and it is hard for the old to make new friends; we become acquainted, but not wedded. The new days can never be to us what the old were. In our youth the days become a part of us; they mingle with our blood; they take on the very color of our souls; but in age they hardly touch us; they come and go like strangers. Only youth can live in the present and the future. In youth we constantly pay tribute to the future, and, to make the account even, in age we constantly pay tribute to the past. In afternoon, walk over to the woods and to Slabsides, while Julian and Hud drive up after the boat. January 19. In my walk in the woods saw where a small flock of quail had passed, six of them. They crossed over from Brookman's swamp to mine. What a pretty trail they made in the thin snow! In places where the woods are densest, they seemed to huddle close together like scared children. I could almost fancy them taking hold of hands real babes in the woods. How alert and watchful they have been! Owls, foxes, minks, cats, hunters - all had to be looked out for. In the more open places they scattered more, no doubt looking for food. In the fall there were 12 or 15 of them, now only 6. January 29. The British reverses in South Africa make me gloomy. I am more than willing that British arrogance and superciliousness should get a good slap, but my final interest is in the higher type of civilization and the better race. The Boer was a Boer 200 years ago, and he is a Boer still; he will never be anything else. He is a kind of human woodchuck. He fights well; so will a woodchuck. There is no fear in his prototype of the fields. England will have to take my advice and treble her force-invade their territory with an army of 100,000 men while Buller holds Joubert. This will save bloodshed and end the war. January 30. I suppose that one reason why, during my Alaskan trip, there was all the time an undercurrent of protest and dissatisfaction, is the fact that I have passed from the positive to the negative side of life, when we begin to take in sail; when we want less and not more; when the hunger for new scenes and new worlds to conquer is diminishing; when the inclination not to stir beyond one's own chimney corner is fast growing upon us. The positive side of life lasts till fifty or sixty — differs in different men then there is a neutral belt when we don't care whether we go or not; then the ground begins to slope the other way, and we begin the great retreat. There were no apparent signs of retreat in February as he went about New York meeting friends, on one occasion addressing the Wellesley College women in their club-room. March found him at home, reading the proof of 'The Light of Day,' and having many misgivings about it. On finishing the last batch of proof, he wrote disconsolately, 'Sick enough of the whole business.' To duck-hunting on the Shattega with his son he gladly turned and to sugar-making at the Old Home. Every few days he went over to Slabsides to watch Amasa plant potatoes and celery; to plant his own peas; and sometimes to accompany groups of students from Vassar, from the Quincy school, teachers from Atlantic City, Dr. Chapman, Mr. Rudolf Binder, and many another. As he saw and heard April, so we see it, as we read: A typical, moist April morning, warmth and humidity reign. Sit some time in my summer-house. A meadow-lark on the top of the sugar-maple over my head gives forth her [sic] clear, piercing, memory-stirring note. Then a highhole strikes up under the hilla call to all things to awake and be stirring. He flies from point to point and repeats his call. It is not a song, but a summons and a declaration. It is a voice out of the heart of April - not a sweet voice, but, oh, such a suggestive and pleasing one! It means the new furrow, and the seed, and the first planting; it means the springing grass, and the early flowers; the budding trees; and the chorus in the marshes. It is warm and moist with the breath of mid-April. Wick, wick, wick, wick, wick, he says - Come, be up and doing! Air your house! Burn your rubbish! Scatter your compost! Start your plow! The soft-maples are blooming, the bees are humming, the robins are nesting, the chickens are hatching, the ants are stirring, and I am here to call the hour! Wick, wick, wick, wick, wick! Then the bushsparrow sang her plaintive, delicious strain beyond the currantpatch, while the robins laughed and tee-heed all about. Oh, April, month of my heart! The soil never looked so inviting as in April; one could almost eat it; it is the staff of life; it lusts for the seed. Later one wants it covered with verdure and protected from the too fierce sun. Now his rays seem to vivify it; by and by they will bake it. Go and dig up some horse-radish now, and bring in some crisp spinach, and the sweet and melting roots of the parsnips. Let us taste the flavor of the soil once more the pungent, the crisp, and the sugary. Beware of the angle-worms this morning as you walk in the yard and on the roadside; they are crawling abroad now. Beware of the newts, too, where they cross the road from the woods to the marshes you may tread upon them. In the twilight now the long-drawn trill of the toad may be heard — tr-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-—— a long row of vocal dots on the dusky page of the twilight. It is one of the soothing, quieting sounds - a chain of bubbles, like its chain of eggs - a bell reduced to an even, quieting monotone. These are the only jewels she has about her, these jewels of sound.1 To Miss Clara Reed he sends news from Slabsides: You were lucky to find the water-thrush's nest. I rarely find them, though I look for them every season. There is one now that haunts the little stream that passes my door, and I am hoping it will nest here. Last night my cat [Silly Sally] gave it a scare and herself a partial ducking. She saw the bird disappear between the banks of the ditch and, calculating as nearly as she could where it had alighted, she made the leap at a venture. She missed the bird and plunged into the mud and water. A more disgusted cat I never saw. She came back flirting the wet off her and looking at herself with shame and anger. I reproved her sharply, but could not help laughing. There's a wren's nest near the stream, and two nests of turtledoves close by. The scarlet tanager has a nest near here, I think, but the secret is well kept so far. The other day my old eagle came and sat for two hours on one of the dead hemlocks above me. It was a noble sight. . . . I had young Teddy Roosevelt with me three days, two weeks ago. What a chase he led me! We had some fine adventures. He is only twelve, but has the real stuff in him. He is like his father in minia 'Still more strongly than a previously quoted entry, does this suggest his poem, as yet unwritten, on the song of the toad: A linked chain of bubbling notes, When birds have ceased their calling, |