Chapter 5

"'That's the book, is it?' he replied, showing no curiosity about it, or desire to look into it, but kept drumming on the table--a habit of his that was very annoying to me at times, but of which he was not aware. When 'A Year in the Fields' came out, he looked at some of the pictures, but that was all."

There is something very pathetic in all this--these two brothers living in that isolated cabin in the woods, knit together by the ties of kinship, having in common a deep and yearning love for each other, and for the Old Home in the Catskills,--their daily down-sittings and up-risings outwardly the same, yet so alienated in what makes up one's real existence. The one, the elder, intent on his bees, his thoughts by day revolving about his hives, or concerned with the weather and the daily happenings; at night, as he idly drums with his fingers, dreaming of the old days on the farm--of how he used to dig out rocks to build the fences, of the sugar-making, of cradling the oats in July; while the other--ah! the other, of what was he not thinking!--of the little world of the hives (his thoughts yielding the exquisite "Idyl of the Honey-Bee"), of boyhood days upon the farm, of the wild life around his cabin, of the universe, and of the soul of the poet Whitman, that then much misunderstood man, than whom no one so much as he has helped us to appreciate. Going out and in, attending to his homely tasks (for these brothers did their own housework), the younger brother was all the time thinking of that great soul, of all that association with him had meant to him, and of all that Whitman would mean to America, to the world, as poet, prophet, seer--thinking how out of his knowledge of Whitman as poet and person he could cull and sift and gather together an adequate and worthy estimate of one whom his soul loved as Jonathan loved David!

The mystery of personality--how shall one fathom it? I asked myself this one rainy afternoon, as I sat in the Burroughs homestead and looked from one brother to another, the two so alike and yet so unlike. The one a simple farmer whose interests are circumscribed by the hills which surround the farm on which as children they were reared; the other, whose interests in the early years were seemingly just as circumscribed, but who felt that nameless something--that push from within--which first found its outlet in a deeper interest in the life about him than his brothers ever knew; and who later felt the magic of the world of books; and, still later, the need of expression, an expression which finally showed itself in a masterly interpretation of country life and experiences. The same heredity here, the same environment, the same opportunities--yet how different the result! The farmer has tended and gathered many a crop from the old place since they were boys, but has been blind and deaf to all that has there yielded such a harvest to the other. That other, a plain, unassuming man, "standing at ease in nature," has become a household word because of all that he has contributed to our intellectual and emotional life.

A man who as a lad had roamed the Roxbury hills with John Burroughs and his brothers, and had known the boy John as something of a dreamer, and thought of him in later years as perhaps of less account than his brothers (since they had settled down, owned land, and were leading industrious lives), was traveling in Europe in the eighties. On the top of a stage-coach in the Scottish Highlands he sat next a scholarly-looking man whose garb, he thought, betokened a priest. From some question which the traveler put, the Englishman learned that the stranger was from America. Immediately he showed a lively interest. "From America! Do you, then, know John Burroughs?"

Imagine the surprise of the Delaware County farmer at being questioned about his schoolmate, the dreamer, who, to be sure, "took to books"; but what was he that this Englishman should inquire about him as the one man in America he was eager to learn about! Doubtless Mr. Burroughs was the one literary man the Delaware County farmer did know, though his knowledge was on the personal and not on the literary side. And imagine the surprise of the priest (if priest it was) to find that he had actually lighted upon a schoolmate of the author!--C. B.)

CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH

I seem to have been a healthy, active child, very impressionable, and with more interests and a keener enjoyment of things than most farm boys have. I was fond of the girls back as early as I can remember, and had my sweethearts at a very early age....

I learned my letters at school, when I was five or six, in the old-fashioned way by being called up to the teacher several times a day and naming the letters as he pointed at them where they stood in a perpendicular column in Cobb's Spelling-Book. The vowels and consonants stood in separate columns, and had to be learned one by one, by continued repetition. It took me a long time, I remember, to distinguish _b_ from _d_, and _c_ from _e_. When and how I learned to read I do not remember. I recall Cobb's Second Reader, and later Olney's Geography, and then Dayballs Arithmetic.

I went to school summers till I was old enough to help on the farm, say at the age of eleven or twelve, when my schooling was confined to the winters.

(Illustration of The Old Schoolhouse, Roxbury, New York. From a photograph by M.H. Fanning)

As a boy, the only farm work that appealed to me was sugar-making in the maple woods in spring. This I thoroughly enjoyed. It brought me near to wild nature and was freer from routine than other farm work. Then I soon managed to gather a little harvest of my own from the sugar bush. I used to anticipate the general tapping by a few days or a week, and tap a few trees on my own account along the sunny border of the Woods, and boil the sap down on the kitchen stove (to the disgust of the womenfolks), selling the sugar in the village. I think the first money I ever earned came to me in this way. My first algebra and first grammar I bought with some of this precious money. When I appeared in the village with my basket of small cakes of early sugar, how my customers would hail me and call after me! No one else made such white sugar, or got it to market so early. One season, I remember, I got twelve silver quarters for sugar, and I carried them in my pockets for weeks, jingling them in the face of my envious schoolmates, and at intervals feasting my own eyes upon them. I fear if I could ever again get hold of such money as that was I should become a miser.

Hoeing corn, weeding the garden, and picking stone was drudgery, and haying and harvesting I liked best when they were a good way off; picking up potatoes worried me, but gathering apples suited my hands and my fancy better, and knocking "Juno's cushions" in the spring meadows with my long-handled knocker, about the time the first swallow was heard laughing overhead, was real fun. I always wanted some element of play in my work; buckling down to any sort of routine always galled me, and does yet. The work must be a kind of adventure, and permit of sallies into free fields. Hence the most acceptable work for me was to be sent strawberrying or raspberrying by Mother; but the real fun was to go fishing up Montgomery Hollow, or over on Rose's Brook, this necessitating a long tramp, and begetting a hunger in a few hours that made a piece of rye bread the most delectable thing in the world; yet a pure delight that never sated.

Mother used to bake her bread in the large old-fashioned brick oven, and once or twice a week we boys had to procure oven wood.

"You must get me oven wood this morning," she would say; "I am going to bake today." Then we would scurry around for dry, light, quick wood--pieces of old boxes and boards, and dry limbs. "One more armful," she would often say, when we were inclined to quit too soon. In a half-hour or so, the wood would be reduced to ashes, and the oven properly heated. I can see Mother yet as she would open the oven door and feel the air inside with her hand. "Run, quick, and get me a few more sticks--it is not quite hot enough." When it was ready, the coals and ashes were raked out, and in went the bread, six or seven big loaves of rye, with usually two of wheat. The wheat was for company.

When we would come in at dinner- or supper-time and see wheat bread on the table we would ask: "Who's in the other room?" Maybe the answer would be, "Your Uncle Martin and Aunt Virey." How glad I would be! I always liked to see company. Well, the living was better, and then, company brought a new element into the day; it gave a little tinge of romance to things. To wake up in the morning and think that Uncle Martin and Aunt Virey were there, or Uncle Edmund and Aunt Saliny, quickened the pulse a little. Or, when any of my cousins came,--boys near my own age,--what joy filled the days! And when they went, how lonesome I would be! how forlorn all things looked till the second or third day! I early developed a love of comrades, and was always fond of company--and am yet, as the records of Slabsides show.

I was quite a hunter in my youth, as most farm boys are, but I never brought home much game--a gray squirrel, a partridge, or a wild pigeon occasionally. I think with longing and delight of the myriads of wild pigeons that used to come every two or three years--covering the sky for a day or two, and making the naked spring woods gay and festive with their soft voices and fluttering blue wings. I have seen thousands of them go through a beech wood, like a blue wave, picking up the sprouting beechnuts. Those in the rear would be constantly flying over those in front, so that the effect was that of a vast billow of mingled white and blue and brown, rustling and murmuring as it went. One spring afternoon vast flocks of them were passing south over our farm for hours, when some of them began to pour down in the beech woods on the hill by the roadside. A part of nearly every flock that streamed by would split off and, with a downward wheel and rush, join those in the wood. Presently I seized the old musket and ran out in the road, and then crept up behind the wall, till only the width of the road separated me from the swarms of fluttering pigeons. The air and the woods were literally blue with them, and the ground seemed a yard deep with them. I pointed my gun across the wall at the surging masses, and then sat there spellbound. The sound of their wings and voices filled my ears, and their numbers more than filled my eyes. Why I did not shoot was never very clear to me. Maybe I thought the world was all turning to pigeons, as they still came pouring down from the heavens, and I did not want to break the spell. There I sat waiting, waiting, with my eye looking along the gun-barrel, till, suddenly, the mass rose like an explosion, and with a rush and a roar they were gone. Then I came to my senses and with keen mortification realized what an opportunity I had let slip. Such a chance never came again, though the last great flight of pigeons did not take place till 1875.

When I was about ten or twelve, a spell was put upon me by a red fox in a similar way. The baying of a hound upon the mountain had drawn me there, armed with the same old musket. It was a chilly day in early December. I took up my stand in the woods near what I thought might be the runway, and waited. After a while I stood the butt of my gun upon the ground, and held the barrel with my hand. Presently I heard a rustle in the leaves, and there came a superb fox loping along past me, not fifty feet away. He was evidently not aware of my presence, and, as for me, I was aware of his presence alone. I forgot that I had a gun, that here was the game I was in quest of, and that now was my chance to add to my store of silver quarters. As the unsuspecting fox disappeared over a knoll, again I came to my senses, and brought my gun to my shoulder; but it was too late, the game had gone. I returned home full of excitement at what I had seen, and gave as the excuse why I did not shoot, that I had my mitten on, and could not reach the trigger of my gun. It is true I had my mitten on, but there was a mitten, or something, on my wits also. It was years before I heard the last of that mitten; when I failed at anything they said, "John had his mitten on, I guess."

I remember that I had a sort of cosmogony of my own when I was a mere boy. I used to speculate as to what the world was made of. Partly closing my eyes, I could see what appeared to be little crooked chains of fine bubbles floating in the air, and I concluded that that was the stuff the world was made of. And the philosophers have not yet arrived at a much more satisfactory explanation.

In thinking of my childhood and youth I try to define to myself wherein I differed from my brothers and from other boys in the neighborhood, or wherein I showed any indication of the future bent of my mind. I see that I was more curious and alert than most boys, and had more interests outside my special duties as a farm boy. I knew pretty well the ways of the wild bees and hornets when I was only a small lad. I knew the different bumblebees, and had made a collection of their combs and honey before I had entered my teens. I had watched the little frogs, the hylas, and had captured them and held them till they piped sitting in my hand. I had watched the leaf-cutters and followed them to their nests in an old rail, or under a stone. I see that I early had an interest in the wild life about me that my brothers did not have. I was a natural observer from childhood, had a quick, sure eye and ear, and an eager curiosity. I loved to roam the hills and woods and prowl along the streams, just to come in contact with the wild and the adventurous. I was not sent to Sunday-school, but was allowed to spend the day as I saw fit, provided I did not carry a gun or a fishing-rod. Indeed, the foundation of my knowledge of the ways of the wild creatures was laid when I was a farm boy, quite unconscious of the natural-history value of my observations.

What, or who, as I grew up, gave my mind its final push in this direction would not be easy to name. It is quite certain that I got it through literature, and more especially through the works of Audubon, when I was twenty-five or twenty-six years of age.

The sentiment of nature is so full and winsome in the best modern literature that I was no doubt greatly influenced by it. I was early drawn to Wordsworth and to our own Emerson and Thoreau, and to the nature articles in the "Atlantic Monthly," and my natural-history tastes were stimulated by them.

I have a suspicion that "nature-study" as now followed in the schools--or shall I say in the colleges?--this classroom peeping and prying into the mechanism of life, dissecting, probing, tabulating, void of free observation, and shut away from the open air--would have cured me of my love of nature. For love is the main thing, the prime thing, and to train the eye and ear and acquaint one with the spirit of the great-out-of-doors, rather than a lot of minute facts about nature, is, or should be, the object of nature-study. Who cares about the anatomy of the frog? But to know the live frog--his place in the season and the landscape, and his life-history--is something. If I wanted to instill the love of nature into a child's heart, I should do it, in the first place, through country life, and, in the next place, through the best literature, rather than through classroom investigations, or through books of facts about the mere mechanics of nature. Biology is all right for the few who wish to specialize in that branch, but for the mass of pupils, it is a waste of time. Love of nature cannot be commanded or taught, but in some minds it can be stimulated.

Sweet were the days of my youth! How I love to recall them and dwell upon them!--a world apart, separated from the present by a gulf like that of sidereal space. The old farm bending over the hills and dipping down into the valleys, the woods, the streams, the springs, the mountains, and Father and Mother under whose wings I was so protected, and all my brothers and sisters-how precious the thought of them all! Can the old farm ever mean to future boys what it meant to me, and enter so deeply into their lives? No doubt it can, hard as it is to believe it. The "Bundle place," the "barn on the hill," the "Deacon woods," the clover meadow, the "turn in the road," the burying-ground, the sheep-lot, the bush-lot, the sumac-lot, the "new-barn meadow," the "old-barn meadow," and so on through the list--each field and section of the farm had to me an atmosphere and association of its own. The long, smooth, broad hill--a sort of thigh of the mountain (Old Clump) upon the lower edge of which the house is planted--shut off the west and southwest winds; its fields were all amenable to the plough, yielding good crops of oats, rye, buckwheat, potatoes, or, when in grass, yielding good pasture, divided east and west by parallel stone walls; this hill, or lower slope of the mountain, was one of the principal features of the farm. It was steep, but it was smooth; it was broad-backed and fertile; its soil was made up mainly of decomposed old red sandstone. How many times have I seen its different sections grow ruddy under the side-hill plough! One of my earliest recollections of my father is seeing him, when I was a child of three or four, striding across the middle side-hill lot with a bag slung across his breast, scattering the seed-grain.

How often at early nightfall, while the west was yet glowing, have I seen the grazing cattle silhouetted against the sky. In the winter the northwest winds would sweep the snow clean from the other side, and bring it over to our side and leave it in a long, huge drift that buried the fences and gave the hill an extra full-breasted appearance. The breast of the old hill would be padded with ten or fifteen feet of snow. This drift would often last till May. I have seen it stop the plough. I remember once carrying a jug of water up to Brother Curtis when his plough was within a few feet of the snow. Woodchucks would sometimes feel the spring through this thick coverlid of snow and bore up through it to the sunlight. I think the woodchuck's alarm clock always goes off before April is done, and he comes forth, apparently not to break his long fast, but to find his mate.

I remember working in oats in the middle side-hill lot one September during the early years of the Civil War, when Hiram was talking of enlisting as a drummer, and when Father and Mother were much worried about it. I carried together the sheaves, putting fifteen in a "shock."

I have heard my father tell of a curious incident that once befell his hired man and himself when they were drawing in oats on a sled from the first side-hill lot. They had on a load, and the hired man had thrust his fork into the upper sides of it and was bringing his weight to bear against its tendency to capsize. But gravity got the better of them and over went the load; the hired man (Rueb Dart) clung to his fork, and swung over the load through the air, alighting on his feet none the worse for the adventure.

The spring that supplies the house and the dairy with water comes from the middle side-hill lot, some forty or fifty rods from the house, and is now brought down in pipes; in my time, in pump-logs. It was always an event when the old logs had to be taken up and new ones put down. I saw the logs renewed twice in my time; once poplar logs were used, and once hemlock, both rather short-lived. A man from a neighboring town used to come with his long auger and bore the logs--a spectacle I was never tired of looking at.

Then the sap bush in the groin of the hill, and but a few minutes' walk from the house, what a feature that was! In winter and in summer, what delightful associations I have with it! I know each of its great sugar maples as I know my friends or the members of the family. Each has a character of its own, and in sap-producing capacity they differ greatly. A fringe of the great trees stood out in the open fields; these were the earliest to run.

In early March we used to begin to make ready for sugar-making by overhauling the sap "spiles," resharpening the old ones, and making new ones. The old-fashioned awkward sap-gouge was used in tapping in those days, and the "spiles" or spouts were split out of basswood blocks with this gouge, and then sharpened so as to fit the half-round gash which the gouge made in the tree. The dairy milk-pans were used to catch the sap, and huge iron kettles to boil it down in.

When the day came to tap the bush, the caldrons, the hogsheads, and the two hundred or more pans with the bundles of spiles were put upon the sled and drawn by the oxen up to the boiling-place in the sap bush. Father and Brother Hiram did the tapping, using an axe to cut the gash in the tree, and to drive in the gouge below it to make a place for the spile, while one of my younger brothers and I carried the pans and placed them in position.

It was always a glad time with me; the early birds were singing and calling, the snowbanks were melting, the fields were getting bare, the roads drying, and spring tokens were on every hand. We gathered the sap by hand in those days, two pails and a neck-yoke. It was sturdy work. We would usually begin about three or four o'clock, and by five have the one hundred and fifty pailfuls of sap in the hogsheads. When the sap ran all night, we would begin the gathering in the morning. The syruping-off usually took place at the end of the second day's boiling, when two or three hundred pailfuls of sap had been reduced to four or five of syrup. In the March or April twilight, or maybe after dark, we would carry those heavy pails of syrup down to the house, where the liquid was strained while still hot. The reduction of it to sugar was done upon the kitchen stove, from three hundred to five hundred pounds being about the average annual yield.

The bright warm days at the boiling-place I love best to remember; the robins running about over the bare ground or caroling from the treetops, the nuthatches calling, the crows walking about the brown fields, the bluebirds flitting here and there, the cows lowing or restless in the barnyard.

When I think of the storied lands across the Atlantic,--England, France, Germany, Italy, so rich in historical associations, steeped in legend and poetry, the very look of the fields redolent of the past,--and then turn to my own native hills, how poor and barren they seem!--not one touch anywhere of that which makes the charm of the Old World--no architecture, no great names; in fact, no past. They look naked and prosy, yet how I love them and cling to them! They are written over with the lives of the first settlers that cleared the fields and built the stone walls--simple, common-place lives, worthy and interesting, but without the appeal of heroism or adventure.

The land here is old, geologically, dating back to the Devonian Age, the soil in many places of decomposed old red sandstone; but it is new in human history, having been settled only about one hundred and fifty years.