Chapter 4

Father and Mother first went to keeping house on Grandfather Burroughs's old place--not in the log house, but in the frame house of which you saw the foundations. Brother Hiram was born there.

(Mr. Burroughs's last walk with his father was to the crumbling foundations of this house. I have heard him tell how his father stood and pointed out the location of the various rooms--the room where they slept the first night they went there; the one where the eldest child was born; that in which his mother died. I stood (one August day in 1902) with Mr. Burroughs on the still remaining joists of his grandfather's house--grass-grown, and with the debris of stones and beams mingling with weeds and bushes. He pointed out to me, as his father had done for him, the location of the various rooms, and mused upon the scenes enacted there; he showed where the paths led to the barn and to the spring, and seemed to take a melancholy interest in picturing the lives of his parents and grandparents. A sudden burst of gladness from a song sparrow, and his musings gave way to attentive pleasure, and the sunlit Present claimed him instead of the shadowy Past. He was soon rejoicing in the discovery of a junco's nest near the foundations of the old house.--C.B.)

My father, Chauncey Burroughs, was born December 20, 1803. He received a fair schooling for those times--the three R's--and taught school one or two winters. His reading was the Bible and hymn-book, his weekly secular paper, and a monthly religious paper.

He used to say that as a boy he was a very mean one, saucy, quarrelsome, and wicked, liked horse-racing and card-playing--both alike disreputable in those times. In early manhood he "experienced religion" and joined the Old-School Baptist Church, of which his parents were members, and then all his bad habits seem to have been discarded. He stopped swearing and Sabbath-breaking, and other forms of wickedness, and became an exemplary member of the community. He was a man of unimpeachable veracity; bigoted and intolerant in his religious and political views, but a good neighbor, a kind father, a worthy citizen, a fond husband, and a consistent member of his church. He improved his farm, paid his debts, and kept his faith. He had no sentiment about things and was quite unconscious of the beauties of nature over which we make such an ado. "The primrose by the river's brim" would not have been seen by him at all. This is true of most farmers; the plough and the hoe and the scythe do not develop their aesthetic sensibilities; then, too, in the old religious view the beauties of this world were vain and foolish.

I have said that my father had strong religious feeling. He took "The Signs of the Times" for over forty years, reading all those experiences with the deepest emotion. I remember when a mere lad hearing him pray in the hog-pen. It was a time of unusual religious excitement with him, no doubt; I heard, and ran away, knowing it was not for me to hear.

Father had red hair, and a ruddy, freckled face. He was tender-hearted and tearful, but with blustering ways and a harsh, strident voice. Easily moved to emotion, he was as transparent as a child, with a child's lack of self-consciousness. Unsophisticated, he had no art to conceal anything, no guile, and, as Mother used to say, no manners. "All I ever had," Father would rejoin, "for I've never used any of them." I doubt if he ever said "Thank you" in his life; I certainly never heard him. He had nothing to conceal, and could not understand that others might have. I have heard him ask people what certain things cost, men their politics, women their ages, with the utmost ingenuousness. One day when he and I were in Poughkeepsie, we met a strange lad on the street with very red hair, and Father said to him, "I can remember when my hair was as red as yours." The boy stared at him and passed on.

Although Father lacked delicacy, he did not lack candor or directness. He would tell a joke on himself with the same glee that he would on any one else.... I have heard him tell how, in 1844, at the time of the "anti-renters," when he saw the posse coming, he ran over the hill to Uncle Daniel's and crawled under the bed, but left his feet sticking out, and there they found him. He had not offended, or dressed as an Indian, but had sympathized with the offenders.

He made a great deal of noise about the farm, sending his voice over the hills (we could hear him calling us to dinner when we were working on the "Rundle Place," half a mile away), shouting at the cows, the pigs, the sheep, or calling the dog, with needless expenditure of vocal power at all times and seasons. The neighbors knew when Father was at home; so did the cattle in the remotest field. His bark was always to be dreaded more than his bite. His threats of punishment were loud and severe, but the punishment rarely came. Never but once did he take a gad to me, and then the sound was more than the substance. I deserved more than I got: I had let a cow run through the tall grass in the meadow when I might easily have "headed her off," as I was told to do. Father used to say "No," to our requests for favors (such as a day off to go fishing or hunting) with strong emphasis, and then yield to our persistent coaxing.

One day I was going to town and asked him for money to buy an algebra. "What is an algebra?" He had never heard of an algebra, and couldn't see why I needed one; he refused the money, though I coaxed and Mother pleaded with him. I had left the house and had got as far as the big hill up there by the pennyroyal rock, when he halloed to me that I might get the algebra--Mother had evidently been instrumental in bringing him to terms. But my blood was up by this time, and as I trudged along to the village I determined to wait until I could earn the money myself for the algebra, and some other books I coveted. I boiled sap and made maple-sugar, and the books were all the sweeter by reason of the maple-sugar money.

When I wanted help, as I did two or three times later, on a pinch. Father refused me; and, as it turned out, I was the only one of his children that could or would help him when the pinch came--a curious retribution, but one that gave me pleasure and him no pain. I was better unhelped, as it proved, and better for all I could help him. But he was a loving father all the same. He couldn't understand my needs, but love outweighs understanding.

He did not like my tendency to books; he was afraid, as I learned later, that I would become a Methodist minister--his pet aversion. He never had much faith in me--less than in any of his children; he doubted if I would ever amount to anything. He saw that I was an odd one, and had tendencies and tastes that he did not sympathize with. He never alluded to my literary work; apparently left it out of his estimate of me. My aims and aspirations were a sealed book to him, as his peculiar religious experiences were to me, yet I reckon it was the same leaven working in us both.

I remember, on my return from Dr. Holmes's seventieth birthday breakfast, in 1879, a remark of father's. He had overheard me telling sister Abigail about the breakfast, and he declared: "I had rather go to hear old Elder Jim Mead preach two hours, if he was living, than attend all the fancy parties in the world." He said he had heard him preach when he did not know whether he was in the body or out of the body. The elder undoubtedly had a strong natural eloquence.

Although Father never spoke to me of my writings, Abigail once told me that when she showed him a magazine with some article of mine in, and accompanied by a photograph of me, he looked at it a long time; he said nothing, but his eyes filled with tears.

He went to school to the father of Jay Gould, John Gould--the first child born in the town of Roxbury (about 1780 or 1790).

He married Amy Kelly, my mother, in 1827. He was six years her senior. She lived over in Red Kill where he had taught school, and was one of his pupils. I have often heard him say: "I rode your Uncle Martin's old sorrel mare over to her folks' when I went courting her." When he would be affectionate toward her before others, Mother would say, "Now, Chauncey, don't be foolish."

Father bought the farm of 'Riah Bartram's mother, and moved on it in 1827. In a house that stood where the Old Home does now, I was born, April 3, 1837. It was a frame house with three or four rooms below and one room "done off" above, and a big chamber. I was the fifth son and the seventh child of my parents.

(Illustration of Birthplace of John Burroughs, Roxbury, New York. From a photograph by Charles S. Olcott)

Mother was in her twenty-ninth year when she was carrying me. She had already borne four boys and two girls; her health was good and her life, like that of all farmers' wives in that section, was a laborious one. I can see her going about her work--milking, butter-making, washing, cooking, berry-picking, sugar-making, sewing, knitting, mending, and the thousand duties that fell to her lot and filled her days. Both she and Father were up at daylight in summer, and before daylight in winter. Sometimes she had help in the kitchen, but oftener she did not. The work that housewives did in those times seems incredible. They made their own soap, sugar, cheese, dipped or moulded their candles, spun the flax and wool and wove it into cloth, made carpets, knit the socks and mittens and "comforts" for the family, dried apples, pumpkins, and berries, and made the preserves and pickles for home use.

Mother went about all these duties with cheerfulness and alacrity. She more than kept up her end of the farm work. She was more strenuous than father. How many hours she sat up mending and patching our clothes, while we were sleeping! Rainy days meant no let-up in her work, as they did in Father's.

The first suit of clothes I remember having, she cut and made. Then the quilts and coverlids she pieced and quilted! We used, too, in my boyhood to make over two tons of butter annually, the care of which devolved mainly upon her, from the skimming of the pans to the packing of the butter in the tubs and firkins, though the churning was commonly done by a sheep or a dog. We made our own cheese, also. As a boy I used to help do the wheying, and I took toll out of the sweet curd. One morning I ate so much of the curd that I was completely cloyed, and could eat none after that.

I can remember Mother's loom pounding away hour after hour in the chamber of an outbuilding where she was weaving a carpet, or cloth. I used to help do some of the quilling--running the yarn or linen thread upon spools to be used in the shuttles. The distaff, the quill-wheel, the spinning-wheel, the reel, were very familiar to me as a boy; so was the crackle, the swingle, the hetchel, for Father grew flax which Mother spun into thread and wove into cloth for our shirts and summer trousers, and for towels and sheets. Wearing those shirts, when new, made a boy's skin pretty red. I dare say they were quite equal to a hair shirt to do penance in; and wiping on a new home-made linen towel suggested wiping on a brier bush. Dear me! how long it has been since I have seen any tow, or heard a loom or a spinning-wheel, or seen a boy breaking in his new flax-made shirt! No one sees these things any more.

Mother had but little schooling; she learned to read, but not to write or cipher; hence, books and such interests took none of her time. She was one of those uneducated countrywomen of strong natural traits and wholesome instincts, devoted to her children; she bore ten, and nursed them all--an heroic worker, a helpful neighbor, and a provident housewife, with the virtues that belonged to so many farmers' wives in those days, and which we are all glad to be able to enumerate in our mothers.

She had not a large frame, but was stout; had brown hair and blue eyes, a fine strong brow, and a straight nose with a strong bridge to it. She was a woman of great emotional capacity, who felt more than she thought. She scolded a good deal, but was not especially quick-tempered. She was an Old-School Baptist, as was Father.

She was not of a vivacious or sunny disposition--always a little in shadow, as it seems to me now, given to brooding and to dwelling upon the more serious aspects of life. How little she knew of all that has been done and thought in the world! and yet the burden of it all was, in a way, laid upon her. The seriousness of Revolutionary times, out of which came her father and mother, was no doubt reflected in her own serious disposition. As I have said, her happiness was always shaded, never in a strong light; and the sadness which motherhood, and the care of a large family, and a yearning heart beget was upon her. I see myself in her perpetually. A longing which nothing can satisfy I share with her. Whatever is most valuable in my books comes from her--the background of feeling, of pity, of love comes from her.

She was of a very different temperament from Father--much more self-conscious, of a more breeding, inarticulate nature. She was richly endowed with all the womanly instincts and affections. She had a decided preference for Abigail and me among her children, wanted me to go to school, and was always interceding with Father to get me books. She never read one of my books. She died in 1880, at the age of seventy-three. I had published four of my books then.

She had had a stroke of apoplexy in the fall of 1879, but lived till December of the following year, dying on father's seventy-seventh birthday. (He lived four years more.) We could understand but little of what she said after she was taken ill. She used to repeat a line from an old hymn--"Only a veil between."

She thought a good deal of some verses I wrote--"My Brother's Farm"--and had them framed. (You have seen them in the parlor at the Old Home. I wrote them in Washington the fall that you were born. I was sick and forlorn at the time.)

I owe to Mother my temperament, my love of nature, my brooding, introspective habit of mind--all those things which in a literary man help to give atmosphere to his work. In her line were dreamers and fishermen and hunters. One of her uncles lived alone in a little house in the woods. His hut was doubtless the original Slabsides. Grandfather Kelly was a lover of solitude, as all dreamers are, and Mother's happiest days, I think, were those spent in the fields after berries. The Celtic element, which I get mostly from her side, has no doubt played an important part in my life. My idealism, my romantic tendencies, are largely her gift.

On my father's side I find no fishermen or hermits or dreamers. I find a marked religious strain, more active and outspoken than on Mother's. The religion of the Kellys was, for the most part, of the silent, meditative kind, but there are preachers and teachers and scholars on Father's side--one of them, Stephen Burroughs (b. 1765), a renegade preacher. Doubtless most of my own intellectual impetus comes from this side of the family. There are also cousins and second cousins on this side who became preachers, and some who became physicians, but I recall none on the Kelly side.

In size and physical make-up I am much like my father. I have my father's foot, and I detect many of his ways in my own. My loud and harmless barking, when I am angered, I get from him. The Kellys are more apt to bite. I see myself, too, in my brothers, in their looks and especially in their weaknesses. Take from me my special intellectual equipment, and I am in all else one of them.

(Speaking of their characteristics as a family, Mr. Burroughs says that they have absolute inability to harbor resentment (a Celtic trait); that they never have "cheek" to ask enough for what they have to sell, lack decision, and are easily turned from their purpose. Commenting on this, he has often said: "We are weak as men--do not make ourselves felt in the community. But this very weakness is a help to me as a writer upon Nature. I don't stand in my own light. I get very close to bird and beast. My thin skin lets the shy and delicate influences pass. I can surrender myself to Nature without effort. I am like her.... That which hinders me with men, makes me strong with impersonal Nature, and admits me to her influences.... I am lacking in moral fibre, but am tender and sympathetic.")

To see Mr. Burroughs stand and fondly gaze upon the fruitful, well-cultivated fields that his father had cared for so many years, to hear him say that the hills are like father and mother to him, was to realize how strong is the filial instinct in him--that and the home feeling. As he stood on the crest of the big hill by the pennyroyal rock, looking down on the peaceful homestead in the soft light of a midsummer afternoon, his eye roamed fondly over the scene:--

"How fertile and fruitful it is now, but how lonely and bleak the old place looked in that winter landscape the night I drove up from the station in the moonlight after hearing of Father's death! There was a light in the window, but I knew Father would not meet me at the door this time--beleaguering winter without, and Death within!

"Father and Mother! I think of them with inexpressible love and yearning, wrapped in their last eternal sleep. They had, for them, the true religion, the religion of serious, simple, hard-working. God-fearing lives. To believe as they did, to sit in their pews, is impossible to me--the Time-Spirit has decreed otherwise; but all I am or can be or achieve is to emulate their virtues--my soul can be saved only by a like truthfulness and sincerity."

The following data concerning his brothers and sisters were given me by Mr. Burroughs in conversation:--

Hiram, born in 1827, was an unpractical man and a dreamer; he was a bee-keeper. He showed great aptitude in the use of tools, could make axe-handles, neck-yokes, and the various things used about the farm, and was especially skilled in building stone walls. But he could not elbow his way in a crowd, could not make farming pay, and was always pushed to the wall. He cared nothing for books, and although he studied grammar when a boy, and could parse, he never could write a grammatical sentence. He died at the age of seventy-five.

Olly Ann was about two years younger than Hiram. Mr. Burroughs remembers her as a frail, pretty girl, with dark-brown eyes, a high forehead, and a wasp-like waist. She had a fair education for her time, married and had two children, and died in early womanhood of phthisis.

Wilson was a farmer, thrifty and economical. He married but had no children. He was evidently somewhat neurotic; as a child, even when well, he would groan and moan in his sleep, and he died, at the age of twenty-eight, after a short illness, of a delirious fever.

Curtis also was a farmer, but lacked judgment; could not look ahead; thought if he gave his note a debt was canceled, and went on piling up other indebtedness. He had a very meagre schooling, but was apt at witty remarks. He was temperate; was much given to reading "The Signs of the Times," like his father before him. He married and had five children. For many years previous to his death he lived at the homestead, dying there in his eightieth year, in the summer of 1912. Two of his unmarried children still live at the Old Home,--of all places on the earth the one toward which Mr. Burroughs turns with the most yearning fondness.

Edmund died in infancy.

Jane, a tender-hearted, old-fashioned woman, who cried and fretted easily, and worried over trifles, was a good housekeeper, and a fond mother--a fat, dumpy little woman with a doleful voice. She was always urging her brother not to puzzle his head about writing; writing and thinking, she said, were "bad for the head." When he would go away on a journey of only a hundred miles, she would worry incessantly lest something happen to him. She married and had five daughters. Her death occurred in May, 1912, at the age of seventy-seven. "Poor Jane!" said Mr. Burroughs one day, when referring to her protests against his writing; "I fear she never read a dozen printed words of mine--or shall I say 'lucky Jane'?"

John, born in 1837, was always "an odd one." (One is reminded of what William R. Thayer said of the Franklin family: "Among the seventeen Franklin children one was a Benjamin, and the rest nobodies.")

Eden was born in 1839. Frail most of his life, in later years he has become robust, and now (1913) is the only surviving member of the family besides Mr. Burroughs. He is cheery and loquacious, methodical and orderly, and very punctilious in dress. (One day, in the summer of 1912, when he was calling at "Woodchuck Lodge,"--the summer home where Mr. Burroughs has lived of late years, near the old place where he was born,--this brother recounted some of their youthful exploits, especially the one which yielded the material for the essay "A White Day and a Red Fox." "I shot the fox and got five dollars for it," said Mr. Eden Burroughs, "and John wrote a piece about it, and got seventy-five.")

Abigail, the favorite sister of our author, appreciated her brother's books and his ideals more than any other member of the family. She married and had two children. At the time of her death, in 1901, of typhoid fever (at the age of fifty-eight) the band of brothers and sisters had been unbroken by death for more than thirty-seven years. Her loss was a severe blow to her brother. He had always shared his windfalls with her; she had read some of his essays, and used to talk with him about his aspirations, encouraging him timidly, before he had gained recognition.

Eveline died at the age of five years.

The death of his brother Hiram, in 1904, made the past bleed afresh for Mr. Burroughs. "He was next to Father and Mother in my affections," he wrote. "Oh! if I had only done more for him--this is my constant thought. If I could only have another chance! How generous death makes us! Go, then, and make up by doing more for the living."

As I walked with him about the Old Home, he said, "I can see Hiram in everything here; in the trees he planted and grafted, in these stone walls he built, in this land he so industriously cultivated during the years he had the farm."

So large a place in his affections did this brother hold, and yet how wide apart were these two in their real lives! I know of no one who has pictured the pathos of lives so near and yet so far apart as has George Eliot when she says: "Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsion, and ties us by our heart-strings to the beings that jar us at every moment. We hear a voice with the very cadence of our own uttering the thoughts we despise; we see eyes--ah! so like our mother's--averted from us in cold alienation."

We cannot tell why one boy in a family turns out a genius, while the others stay in the ancestral ruts and lead humdrum, placid lives, any more than we can tell why one group of the hepaticas we gather in the April woods has the gift of fragrance, while those of a sister group in the same vicinity are scentless. A caprice of fate, surely, that "mate and mate beget such different issues."

"Hiram was with me at Slabsides," said Mr. Burroughs, "much of the time when I was writing the Whitman book, but never referred to it in any way. When it came from the press, I said to him, 'Hiram, here is the book you have heard me speak about as having cost me nearly four years' work, and which I rewrote four times.'"