term is generally used, but a country of open green spaces and long sweeping lines in which the eye delights. It is a land of crystal springs and purling trout-brooks, with cattle upon a thousand hills.

It is important in estimating the man and his works to realize how thorough his affiliations with the home scenes have always been, how deep-seated his longings when separated from them. When, at the age of seventeen, he left the old scenes behind, he left his heart there also-every summer throughout his life returning to the Old Home to spend some part of it amid the hills. From the home-farm he gathered most of the harvest of his earlier books, and there, in his steadily productive later years, the greater part of his last eight volumes was written. A true autochthon, this very gentle Antæus knew that he derived his strength from Mother Earth; his instinct for self-preservation kept him close to her sustaining breast.

To his humble origin is due the fact that he looked out upon the universe with fresh, eager eyes. From virgin soil his rich and copious crops were gathered, and while inaptitude for scholarly things necessitated much experimenting and literary fumbling, most of this, being ploughed under, served only to enrich the soil.

His environment clothed him as a mantle. It stamped itself upon his soul. Peculiarly fluid and impressionable, his psychology, and consequently his style, seem literally to have been shaped by the long flowing lines of the hills upon which he looked as a child, by the wide valleys, the wooded heights, the mountain streams. Their counterpart is found upon his page. Nothing in his writing is broken or abrupt; his sentences flow with the same large simplicity as do the lines of his native landscape; seem as spontaneous as the springs; yield the quiet and privacy of the woods; and are as limpid, musical, and varied as a mountain brook - loitering here, hurrying there, 'full but not turbid, sparkling but not frothy, every shallow quickly compensated for by a deep reach of thought.' His page offers freshness, variety, lucidity, power.

One midsummer day many years ago, while walking across the fields of the old home-farm, he halted and gazed yearningly at the slope behind the homestead, saying, after a pause, 'Oh, my native hills! Will they ever mean to any one else what they have meant to me? Once in a hundred years, perhaps, one might come to whom they would mean as much.' And, con

tinuing, 'Others have loved them, of course, but not as I have loved them and yearned over them, and drawn my inspiration from them.' Yet when a boy upon this farm he never thought of the landscape as beautiful; the breezy upland heights over which he roamed were taken as a matter of course. Not until he had gone away from them, and then returned, did he know them as beautiful. 'These hills are like Father and Mother to me,' he often said; and, oftener still, at sundown, climbed to a height overlooking the homestead, there in the waning light listening to the plaintive strain of the vesper sparrow, or catching, as it floated down from the mountain, the chant of the hermit thrush.

In his Autobiographical Sketches he has said that his descent on his paternal side is largely English,' on the maternal, largely Irish; and that he knows no break in the line of farmers in his ancestry back to the seventeenth century. Up to this time but three men in the United States by the name of Burroughs were conspicuously connected with other than rural pursuits — the Reverend George Burroughs (collateral line), who in 1692 was hanged as a wizard at Salem; one Stephen Burroughs (lineal descent), born in 1729, who achieved distinction as mathematician and astronomer, and who devised the system of Federal money adopted by the Congress of the United States in 1790; and a cousin of his father's, Dr. John C. Burroughs, a graduate of Yale, who became the first president of the first Chicago University.

His earliest lineal ancestor in the United States of whom we have any record was named John. Coming from the West Indies and settling in Stratford, Connecticut, about 1690, he

1 See Our Friend John Burroughs. This book is the source of most of the quotations from J. B. found in this chapter. The sketches themselves were written to me in the form of letters, in 1903, and later, up to 1912.

2 Two entries in his Journal ascribe also a Welsh origin on the paternal side, although he usually emphasized his Celtic strain as chiefly Irish, and derived from his maternal forbears. He says in the Journal, 'I am quite persuaded that my family [paternal] is Welsh and pure Celtic.'

One who has written of him and his ancestry has labored to prove, despite Burroughs's own statements, that his Celtic traits are chiefly Scottish; and, though not proving his case, contends for this opinion with an obstinacy that betrays his own Scottish origin. Apparently because, back in 1897, in a felicitous bit of criticism, he had, without the support of facts, made Burroughs wear the Scottish thistle in his cap, as well as the English rose upon his breast, he still strives to maintain the statement, instead of substituting the shamrock for the thistle, and the Welsh emblem (whatever it be), as the facts demand. Mr. Burroughs's love of the Scottish people was so strong that, had he been able to trace the least strain of Scottish blood in his veins, he would have been eager to claim it.

there married Patience Hinman in 1694. Their eldest son, Stephen, born in 1695, married Ruth Nichols in 1719. The third child of this union, also Stephen, became the noted astronomer already mentioned; the seventh child, Ephraim, born in 1740, was the great-grandfather of our author.

Ephraim Burroughs reared a large family and, about the beginning of the Revolution, left Connecticut for New York State, settling in the county of Delaware, near Stamford, where he died in 1818. He was buried in an unmarked grave, in a field now under cultivation. His great-grandson often expressed regret that he did not know the spot where his body lay.

In 1795 the grandparents of John Burroughs, Eden Burroughs and Rachel Avery, moved over the mountain from Stamford to Roxbury, cutting a road through the woods and bringing all their goods and chattels on a sled drawn by oxen. Here, only a few minutes' walk from the place where John Burroughs himself was to be born, they cleared the land, built a log house with a bark roof of black ash, and a floor of hewn logs. The day on which she began housekeeping in that little hut in the woods, his grandmother declared, was the happiest of her life. (The same love of the chimney-corner and of domesticity was conspicuous in her gifted grandson.) Subsequently her mother, 'Granny Avery,' lived with them—a sensitive, petulant woman who one day, when reproved for something, went and hid in the bushes and sulked. 'It is a family trait I'm a little that way myself,' confessed her great-grandson. In truth, it was his custom during adult life, when harassed or perturbed by the friction of domestic life, or by annoying contact with fellow mortals, to retreat to the woods, finding in the seclusion of nature serenity and healing. One of his maternal uncles, something of a hermit, lived by himself in a hut in the woods.

Eden Burroughs, the paternal grandfather, was a quiet, exemplary man, spare of build, thrifty, domestic, gentle in manner, and religiously inclined an Old School Baptist. He died at seventy-two.

From the Burroughs branch John Burroughs said he derived his love of peace and solitude and his intellectual impetus. They were of serious trend; 'not strongly sketched in on the canvas of life; not self-assertive, never roistering or

uproarious.' While the most of them were farmers, a few in collateral branches became preachers, teachers, and physicians.

From the paternal grandmother, Rachel Avery (as well as from his mother's side), he derived a Celtic strain. Of Welsh origin, her complexion was sandy, as was his father's, a coloring which prevails in many nieces and nephews. (Mr. Burroughs himself had chestnut hair before it began, in his fortieth year, to whiten.) Rachel Avery reared a large family; helped in the fields and at sugar-making; and rode a long distance to mill on horseback, with the meal-bags and a baby.

Edmund Kelly,' the maternal grandfather, of Irish descent, was born in Frederickstown, Dutchess County, New York, in 1767. He served under Washington as a boy of fourteen in the Revolutionary War, at first in some humbler capacity, later carrying a musket; and 'doing justice to his country and honor to himself,' as Jay Gould records in his 'History of Delaware County.' In the War of 1812, Edmund Kelly went in the place of a drafted son, preferring the life of adventure to the humdrum life of the farm.

His grandson vividly recollected the little old man with big head and pronounced Irish features, with his blue, brassbuttoned army-coat and red-top boots, who used to tell of the winter at Valley Forge, and who was always ready to go a-fishing. 'Gran'ther was a dreamer, and not a good provider. He would get the trout, but I suspect Granny was sometimes at her wit's end to find the fat to fry them in.' A believer in spooks and witches, he regaled his grandchildren with creepy tales that, in the telling, frightened him anew.

There was doubtless something in Gran'ther Kelly which foreshadowed the nature-lover and writer, although in him it took the form of a love of angling and of the Bible.

He went from the Book to the stream, and from the stream to the Book with great regularity; and when past eighty would woo the trout-streams with all his early fervor. From him I get my dreamy, shirking ways [confessed the grandson]; from him, too, I get that almost feminine sensibility and tinge of melancholy that shows in my books. That emotional Celt, ineffectual in some ways, full of longings and impossible dreams- temporizing, revolutionary, mystical - surely that man is in me, and surely he comes from my Revolutionary ancestor, Gran'ther Kelly.2

''Kelley' is the spelling used by some branches of the family.

• Condensed from Autobiographical Sketches in Our Friend John Burroughs.