Chapter 13

"Down in the Hollow," as they call the village of Robbery, he drew my attention to the building which was once the old academy, and where he had his dream of going to school. He remembers as a lad of thirteen going down to the village one evening to hear a man, McLaurie, talk up the academy before there was one in Roxbury. "I remember it as if it were yesterday; a few of the leading men of the village were there. I was the only boy. I've wondered since what possessed me to go. In his talk the man spoke of what a blessing it would be to boys of that vicinity, pointing me out and saying, 'Now, like that boy, there.' I recall how I dropped my head and blushed. He was a small man, very much in earnest. When I heard of his death a few years ago, it gave me long, long thoughts. He finally got the academy going, taught it, and had a successful school there for several years, but I never got there. The school in the West Settlement, Father thought, was good enough for me. But my desire to go, and dreaming of it, impressed it and him upon me more, perhaps, than the boys who really went were impressed. How outside of it all I felt when I used to go down there to the school exhibitions! It was after that that I had my dream of going to Harpersfield Seminary--the very name had a romantic sound. Though Father had promised me I might go, when the time came he couldn't afford it; he didn't mean to go back on his word, but there was very little money--I wonder how they got along so well as they did with so little."

"As a boy it had been instilled into my mind that God would strike one dead for mocking him. One day Ras Jenkins and I were crossing this field when it began to thunder. Ras turned up his lips to the clouds contemptuously. 'Oh, don't, you'll be struck,' I cried, cringing in expectation of the avenging thunderbolt. What a revelation it was when he was not struck! I immediately began to think, 'Now, maybe God isn't so easily offended as I thought'; but it seemed to me any God with dignity ought to have been offended by such an act."

Mr. Burroughs showed me the old rosebush in the pasture, all that was left to mark the site where a house had once stood; even before his boyhood days this house had become a thing of the past. The roses, though, had always been a joy to him, and had played such a part in his early days that he had transplanted some of the old bush to a spot near his doorsteps at Slabsides. Once when he sent me some of the roses he wrote of them thus: "The roses of my boyhood! Take the first barefooted country lad you see with homemade linen trousers and shirt, and ragged straw hat, and put some of these roses in his hand, and you see me as I was fifty-five years ago. They are the identical roses, mind you. Sometime I will show you the bush in the old pasture where they grew."

One day we followed the course he and his brothers and sisters used to take on their way to school. Leaving the highway near the old graveyard, we went down across a meadow, then through a beech wood, and on through the pastures in the valley along which a trout brook used to flow, on across more meadows and past where a neglected orchard was, till we came to where the little old schoolhouse itself stood.

How these trout streams used to lure him to play hookey! All the summer noonings, too, were spent there. He spoke feelingly of the one that coursed through the hemlocks--"loitering, log-impeded, losing itself in the dusky, fragrant depths of the hemlocks." They used to play hookey down at Stratton Falls, too, and get the green streaks in the old red sandstone rocks to make slate pencils of, trying them on their teeth to make sure they were soft enough not to scratch their slates. The woods have been greatly mutilated in which they used to loiter on the way to school and gather crinkle-root to eat with their lunches,--though they usually ate it all up before lunch-time came, he said. In one of his books Mr. Burroughs speaks of a schoolmate who, when dying, said, "I must hurry, I have a long way to go over a hill and through a wood, and it is getting dark." This was his brother Wilson, and he doubtless had in mind this very course they used to take in going to school.

This school (where Jay Gould was his playmate) he attended only until he was twelve years of age. A rather curious reciprocal help these two lads gave each other--especially curious in the light of their subsequent careers as writer and financier. The boy John Burroughs was one day feeling very uncomfortable because he could not furnish a composition required of him. Eight lines only were sufficient if the task was completed on time, but the time was up and no line was written. This meant being kept after school to write twelve lines. In this extremity. Jay Gould came to his rescue with the following doggerel:--

"Time is flying past, Night is coming fast, I, minus two, as you all know, But what is more I must hand o'er Twelve lines by night, Or stay and write. Just eight I've got But you know that's not Enough lacking four, But to have twelve It wants no more."

"I have never been able to make out what the third line meant," said Mr. Burroughs. A few years later, when Jay Gould was hard up (he had left school and was making a map of Delaware County), John Burroughs helped him out by buying two old books of him, paying him eighty cents. The books were a German grammar and Gray's "Elements of Geology." The embryo financier was glad to get the cash, and the embryo writer unquestionably felt the richer in possessing the books.

Mr. Burroughs loves to look off toward Montgomery Hollow and talk of the old haunt. "I've taken many a fine string of trout from that stream," he would say. One day he and his brother Curtis and I drove over there and fished the stream, and he could hardly stay in the wagon the last half-mile. "Isn't it time to get out now, Curtis?" he fidgeted every little while. "Not yet, John,--not yet," said the more phlegmatic brother. But it was August, and although the rapid mountain brook seemed just the place for trout, the trout were not in their places. I shall long remember the enticing stream, the pretty cascades, the high shelving rocks sheltering the mossy nest of the phoebe, and the glowing masses of bee-balm blooming beside the stream; yes, and the eagerness of one of the fishermen as he slipped along ahead of me, dropping his hook into the pools. Occasionally he would relinquish the rod, putting it into my hands with a rare self-denial as we came to a promising pool; but I was more deft at gathering bee-balm than taking trout, and willingly spared the rod to the eager angler. And even he secured only two troutling to carry back in his mint-lined creel.

"Trout streams gurgled about the roots of my family tree," he was wont to say as he told of his grandfather Kelly's ardor for the pastime. One day, in crossing the fields near the old home, he showed me the stone wall where he and his grandfather tarried the last time they went fishing together, he a boy of ten and his grandfather past eighty. As they rested on the wall, the old man, without noticing it, sat on the lad's hand as it lay on the wall. "It hurt," Mr. Burroughs said, "but I didn't move till he got ready to get up."

It was a great pleasure to go through the old sap bush with Mr. Burroughs, for there he always lives over again the days in early spring when sugar-making was in progress. He showed where some of the old trees once stood,--the grandmother trees,--and mourned that they were no more; but some of the mighty maples of his boyhood are still standing, and each recalls youthful experiences. He sometimes goes back there now in early spring to re-create the idyllic days. Their ways of boiling sap are different now, and he finds less poetry in the process. But the look of the old trees, the laugh of the robins, and the soft nasal calls of the nuthatch, he says, are the same as in the old times. "How these sounds ignore the years!" he exclaimed as a nuthatch piped in the near-by trees.

Sometimes he would bring over to Woodchuck Lodge from the homestead a cake of maple sugar from the veteran trees, and some of the maple-sugar cookies such as his mother used to make; though he eats sparingly of sweets nowadays. Yet, when he and a small boy would clear the table and take the food down cellar, it was no uncommon thing to see them emerge from the stairway, each munching one of those fat cookies, their eyes twinkling at the thought that they had found the forbidden sweets we had hidden so carefully.

He and this lad of eleven were great chums; they chased wild bees together, putting honey on the stone wall, getting a line on the bees; shelled beechnuts and cracked butternuts for the chipmunks; caught skunks in a trap, just to demonstrate that a skunk can be carried by the tail with impunity, if you only do it right (and, though succeeding one day, got the worst of the bargain the next); and waged war early and late on the flabby woodchucks which one could see almost any hour in the day undulating across the fields. We called these boys "John of Woods," and "John of Woodchucks"; and it was sometimes difficult to say which was the veriest boy, the one of eleven or the one of seventy-four.

One morning I heard them laughing gleefully together as they were doing up the breakfast work. Calling out to learn the cause of their merriment, I found the elder John had forgotten to eat his egg--he had just found it in his coat-pocket, having put it in there to carry from the kitchen to the living-room.

He often amused us by his recital of Thackeray's absurd "Little Billee," and by the application of some of the lines to events in the life at Woodchuck Lodge.

(Illustration of Living-Room, Woodchuck Lodge, with Rustic Furniture made by Mr. Burroughs. From a photograph by M. H. Fanning)

As the evenings grew longer and cooler, we would gather about the table and Mr. Burroughs would read aloud, sometimes from Bergson's "Creative Evolution," under the spell of which he was the entire summer of 1911, sometimes from Wordsworth, sometimes from Whitman. "No other English poet has touched me quite so closely," he said, "as Wordsworth.... But his poetry has more the character of a message, and a message special and personal, to a comparatively small circle of readers." As he read "The Poet's Epitaph" one evening, I was impressed with the strong likeness the portrait there drawn has to Mr. Burroughs:--

"The outward shows of sky and earth, Of hill and valley, he has viewed; And impulses of deeper birth Have come to him in solitude.

In common things that round us lie Some random truths he can impart,-- The harvest of a quiet eye That broods and sleeps on his own heart."

What are the books, and notably the later philosophical essays, of Mr. Burroughs but the "harvest of a quiet eye"? His "Summit of the Years," his "Gospel of Nature" (which one of his friends calls "The Gospel according to Saint John"), his "Noon of Science," his "Long Road"? And most of this rich harvest he has gathered in his journeys back to Pepacton, inspired by the scenes amid which he first felt the desire to write.

Seeing him daily in these scenes, one feels that it may, indeed, be said of him as Matthew Arnold said of Sophocles, that he sees life steadily, and sees it whole. What a masterly handling is his of the facts of the universe, giving his reader the truths of the scientist touched with an idealism such as is only known to the poet's soul! A friend, writing me of "The Summit of the Years," spoke of "its splendid ascent by a rapid crescendo from the personal to the cosmic," and of how gratifying it is to see our author putting forth such fine work in his advancing years. Another friend called it "a beautiful record of a beautiful life." I recall the September morning on which he began that essay. He had written the first sentence--"The longer I live, the more I am impressed with the beauty and the wonder of the world"--when he was interrupted for a time. He spoke of what he had written, and said he hardly knew what he was going to make of it. Later in the day he brought me a large part of the essay to copy, and I remember how moved I was at its beauty, how grateful that I had been present at its inception and birth.

One afternoon he called us from our separate work, the artist from her canvas and me from my typewriter, to look at a wonderful rainbow spanning the wide valley below us. The next day he brought me a short manuscript saying, "If that seems worth while to you, you may copy it--I don't know whether there is anything in it or not." It was "The Rainbow," which appeared some months later in a popular magazine--a little gem, and a good illustration of his ability to throw the witchery of the ideal around the facts of nature. The lad with us had been learning Wordsworth's "Rainbow," a favorite of Mr. Burroughs, and it was no unusual thing of a morning to hear the rustic philosopher while frying the bacon for breakfast, singing contentedly in a sort of tune of his own making:--

"And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety."

One afternoon a neighbor came and took him in her automobile a ride of fifty miles or more, the objective point of which was Ashland, the place where he had attended a seminary in 1854 and 1855. On his return he said it seemed like wizard's work that he could be whisked there and back in one afternoon, to that place which had been the goal of his youthful dreams! They had also called on a schoolmate whom he had not seen for forty years. He told us how a possession of that boy's had been a thing he had coveted for many months--a slate pencil with a shining copper gun-cap! "How I longed for that pencil! I tried to trade for buttons (all I had to offer in exchange), but it was too precious for my small barter, and I coveted it in vain." The wistful Celt began early to sigh for the unattainable.

We picked wild strawberries in June from the "clover lot" where the boy John Burroughs and his mother used to pick them. "I can see her now," he said reminiscently, "her bent figure moving slowly in the summer fields toward home with her basket filled. She would also go berrying on Old Clump, in early haying, long after the berries were gone in the lowlands."

During this summer of which I speak, the fields were a gorgeous mass of color--buttercups and daisies, and the orange hawkweed--a display that rivaled the carpet of gold and purple we had seen in the San Joaquin Valley, in company with John Muir three summers before. Mr. Muir was done before starting for South America. He had promised to come to the Catskills, but had to keep putting it off to get copy ready, and the Laird of Woodchuck Lodge was exasperated that the mountaineer would stay in that hot Babylon,--he, the lover of the wild,--when we in the Delectable Mountains were calling him hither. As we looked upon the riot of color one day, Mr. Burroughs said, "John Muir, confound him! I wish he was here to see this at its height!"

Returning to the little gray farmhouse in the gathering dusk one late September day, Mr. Burroughs paused and turned, looking back at the old home, and up at the cattle silhouetted against the horizon. He gazed upon the landscape long and long. How fondly his eye dwells upon these scenes! So I have seen him look when about to part from a friend--as if he were trying to fix the features and expression in his mind forever.

"The older one grows, the more the later years erode away, as do the secondary rocks, and one gets down to bed-rock,--youth,--and there he wants to rest. These scenes make youth and all the early life real to me, the rest is more like a dream. How incredible it is!--all that is gone; but here it lives again."

(Illustration of On the Porch at Woodchuck Lodge. From a photograph by Charles S. Olcott)

And yet, though he is face to face with the past at his old home, his days there are not so sad as some of his reminiscent talk would seem to indicate. In truth, he is serenely content, so much so that he sometimes almost chides himself for living so much in the present. "Oh, the power of a living reality to veil or blot out the Past!" he sighed. "And yet, is it not best so? Does not the grass grow above graves? Why should these lovely scenes always be a cemetery to me? There seems to have been a spell put upon them that has laid the ghosts, and I am glad." And to see him bird-nesting with his grandchildren, hunting in the woods for crooked sticks for his rustic furniture, waking the echo in the "new barn" (a barn that was new in 1844), routing out a woodchuck from a stone wall, blackberrying on the steep hillsides, or going a half-mile across the fields just to smell the fragrance of the buckwheat bloom, is to know that, wistful Celt that he is, and dominated by the spell of the Past, he is yet very much alive to the Present, out of which he is probably getting as full a measure of content as any man living to-day.

He looked about him at the close of his first stay at Woodchuck Lodge after the completion of the repairs which had made the house so homelike and comfortable, and said contentedly: "A beautiful dream come true! And to think I've stayed down there on the Hudson all these years with never the home feeling, when here were my native hills waiting to cradle me as they did in my youth, and I so slow to return to them! I've been homesick for over forty years: I was an alien there; I couldn't take root there. It was a lucky day when I decided to spend the rest of my summers here"

CAMPING WITH BURROUGHS AND MUIR

In February, 1909, I was one of a small party which set out with Mr. Burroughs for the Pacific Coast and the Hawaiian Islands. The lure held out to him by the friend who arranged his trip was that John Muir would start from his home at Martinez, California, and await him at the Petrified Forests in Arizona; conduct him through, that weirdly picturesque region, and in and around the Grand Canon of the Colorado; camp and tramp with him in the Mojave Desert; tarry awhile in Southern California; then visit Yosemite before embarking on the Pacific preparatory to lotus-eating in Hawaii. The lure held out to the more obscure members of the party was all that has been enumerated, plus that of having these two great, simple men for traveling companions. To see the wonders of the Southwest is in itself great good fortune, but to see them in company with these two students of nature, and to study the students while the students were studying the wonders, was an incalculable privilege.

It frightens me now when I think on what a slight chance hung our opportunity for this unique Journey; for Mr. Burroughs, though at first deciding to go, had later given it up, declaring himself to be too much of a tenderfoot to go so far from home alone at his age.

"Why should I go gadding about to see the strange and the extraordinary?" he wrote me, when trying to argue himself into abandoning the trip. "The whole gospel of my books (if they have any gospel) is 'Stay at home; see the wonderful and the beautiful in the simple things all about you; make the most of the common and the near at hand.' When I have gone abroad, I have carried this spirit with me, and have tested what I have seen by the nature revealed to me at my own doorstep. Well, I am glad I have triumphed at last; I feel much better and like writing again, now that this incubus is off my shoulders." But the incubus soon rested on him again, for the next mail carried a letter begging him to reconsider and let two of his women friends accompany him. So it all came about in a few days, and we were off.

We wondered how Mr. Muir would relish two women being in the party, but assured Mr. Burroughs we should not hamper them, and should be ready to do whatever they were.

"Have no fears on that score," he said; "Muir will be friendly if you are good listeners; and he is well worth listening to. He is very entertaining, but he sometimes talks when I want to be let alone; at least he did up in Alaska."

"But you won't be crusty to him, will you?"

"Oh, no, I shan't dare to be--he is too likely to get the best of one; he is a born tease."

The long journey across the Western States (by the Santa Fe route) was full of interest at every point. Even the monotony of the Middle West was not wearisome, while the scenery and scenes in New Mexico and Arizona were fascinating in the extreme.

Mr. Burroughs had been to the Far West by a northern route, but this was all fresh territory to him, and he brought to it his usual keen appetite for new phases of nature, made still keener by a recently awakened interest in geological subjects. It enhanced the pleasure and profit of the trip a hundredfold to get his first impressions of the moving panorama, as I did when he dictated notes to me from his diary, or descriptive letters to his wife and son. The impression one gets out there of earth sculpture in process is one of the chief attractions of the region, and Mr. Burroughs never tired of studying the physiognomy of the land, and the overwhelming evidences of time and change, and of contrasting these with our still older, maturer landscapes in the East.

In passing through Kansas he commented on the monotonous level expanse of country as being unbearable from any point of view except as good farm land. Used to hills and mountains, inviting brooks and winding roads, he turned away from this unpicturesque land, saying if it was a good place to make money, it was also a place to lose one's own soul--he was already homesick for the beauty and diversity of our more winsome country.

Two days' journey from Chicago and we reached the desert town of Adamana. As the train stopped near the little inn, a voice called out in the darkness, "Hello, Johnnie, is that you?"

"Yes, John Muir"; and there under the big dipper, on the great Arizona desert, the two friends met after a lapse of ten years.

"Muir, aren't you surprised to find me with two women in my wake?" asked Mr. Burroughs, introducing us.

"Yes; surprised that there are only two, Johnnie." Then to us, "Up in Alaska there were a dozen or two following him around, tucking him up in steamer rugs, putting pillows to his head, running to him with a flower, or a description of a bird--Oh, two is a very moderate number, Johnnie, but we'll manage to worry through with them, somehow." And picking up part of our luggage, the tall, grizzly Scot led the way to the inn.

The next day we drove nine miles over the rolling desert to visit one of the petrified forests, of which there are five in that vicinity. Blended with the unwonted scenes--the gray sands dotted with sagebrush and greasewood, the leaping jack rabbits, the frightened bands of half-wild horses, the distant buttes and mesas, and the brilliant blue of the Arizona sky--is the memory of that talk of Mr. Muir's during the long drive, a talk which for range and raciness I have never heard equaled. He often uses the broad dialect of the Scot, translating as he goes along. His forte is in monologue. He is a most engaging talker,--discursive, grave and gay,--mingling thrilling adventures, side-splitting anecdotes, choice quotations, apt characterizations, scientific data, enthusiastic descriptions, sarcastic comments, scornful denunciations, inimitable mimicry.