In the Catskills: Selections from the Writings of John Burroughs

There were two varieties of trout in the lake,--what it seems proper to call silver trout and golden trout; the former were the slimmer, and seemed to keep apart from the latter...

It is unquestionably true that farm life and farm scenes in this country are less picturesque than they were fifty or one hundred years ago. This is owing partly to the advent o...

The quiet and repose of this spruce grove proved to be the calm that goes before the storm. As we passed out of it, we came plump upon the almost perpendicular battlements of Sl...

I delight in sitting on a rock in one of these upper fields, and seeing the sun go down behind Panther. The rapid-flowing brook below me fills all the valley with a soft murmur....

One of the features of farm life peculiar to this country, and one of the most picturesque of them all, is sugar-making in the maple woods in spring. This is the first work of t...

We toiled up the long steep hill, where only an occasional mullein-stalk or other tall weed stood above the snow. Near the top the hill was girded with a bank of snow that blott...

"I may perhaps claim indulgence for adding a little more of the biography of this particular bird, as a representative also of the instincts of her race. She completed the nest...

The partridge is one of our most native and characteristic birds. The woods seem good to be in where I find him. He gives a habitable air to the forest, and one feels as if the...

I have seldom known two of these birds to be singing at the same time in the same locality, rivaling each other, like the wood thrush or the veery. Shooting one from a tree, I h...

[Footnote 1: A recent English writer upon this subject presents an array of facts and considerations that do not support this view. He says that, with very few exceptions, it is...

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Entering the woods, the number and variety of the tracks contrast strongly with the rigid, frozen aspect of things. Warm jets of life still shoot and play amid this snowy desola...

After we had labored and floundered along for about an hour, the road turned to the left, and in a little stumpy clearing near the creek a gable uprose on our view. It did not p...

"Ah!" exclaimed my companion. "Let us pile on more of those dry birch-logs; I feel both the 'fear-chill' and the 'cold-chill' creeping over me. How far is it to the valley of th...