Our Friend John Burroughs Part 13

"It must have turned, didn't it?"

"Yes, the worm surely turned, or I never should have seen it," he confessed.

The feminine member of the trio wields the dish-mop while the host dries the dishes, and the Dreamer before the fire luxuriates in the thought that his help is not needed.

The talk on philosophy and religion does not make the host forget to warm sheets and blankets and put hot bricks in the beds to insure against the fast-gathering cold.

The firelight flickers on the bark-covered rafters, lighting up the yellow-birch part.i.tion between living-room and bedroom downstairs, and plays upon the rustic stairway that leads to the two rooms overhead, as we sit before the hearth in quiet talk. Outside the moonlight floods the great open s.p.a.ce around the cabin, revealing outlines of the rocky inclosure. No sounds in all that stillness without, and within only the low voices of the friends, and the singing logs.

Mr. Burroughs tells of his visit, in October, to the graves of his maternal grandparents:--

"They died in 1854, my first season away from home, and there they have lain for fifty-seven years, and I had never been to their graves! I'm glad I went; it made them live again for me. How plainly I could see the little man in his blue coat with bra.s.s b.u.t.tons, with his decidedly Irish features! And Grandmother, a stout woman, with quaint, homely ways. The moss is on their gravestones now, and two evergreen trees wax strong above them. I found an indigo-bird had built her nest above their graves. I broke off the branch and brought it home."

"There! get up and use that water before it freezes over," the host calls out the next morning, as, mounting the stairs, he places a pitcher of hot water by the door. It is bitter cold, one's fingers ache, and one wonders if, after all, it is so much fun to live in a cabin in the woods in the dead of winter. But a crackling fire below and savory smells of bacon and coffee reconcile one, and the day begins right merrily.

And what a dinner the author sets before us! what fun to see him prepare it, discussing meanwhile the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome, recounting anecdotes of boyhood, touching on politics and religion, on current events, on conflicting views of the vitalists and the chemico-physicists, on this and on that, but never to the detriment of his duck. It is true he did serenely fold his hands and wait, between times. Then what an event to see him lift the smoking cover and try the bird with a fork--" to see if the duck is relenting," he explains. At a certain time he arises from a grave psychological discussion to rake out hollow places in the coals where he buries potatoes and onions.

"The baking of an onion," he declares, "takes all the conceit out of him. He is sweet and humble after his baptism of fire." Then the talk soars above ducks and onions, until he gives one of the idlers permission to prepare the salad and lay the table.

For a dinner to remember all one's days, commend me to a thoroughly relented duck; a mealy, ash-baked potato; an onion (yea, several of them) devoid of conceit, and well b.u.t.tered and salted; and a salad of Slabsides celery and lettuce; with Riverby apples and pears, and beechnuts to complete the feast--beechnuts gathered in October up in the Catskills, gathered one by one as the chipmunk gathers them, by the "Laird of Woodchuck Lodge," as he is called on his native heath, though he is one and the same with the master of Slabsides.

We hear no sounds all the day outside the cabin but the merry calls of chickadees, until in mid-afternoon an unwelcome "Halloa!" tells us the wagon is come to take us down to Riverby. Reluctantly the fire is extinguished, and the wide, hospitable door of Slabsides closes behind us.

Riverby, "the house that Jack built," as the builder boasted, is a house interesting and individual, though conforming somewhat to the conventions of the time when it was built (1874). It is as immaculate within as its presiding genius can make it, presenting a sharp contrast to the easy-going housekeeping of the mountain cabin.

We tarry a few minutes in the little bark-covered study, detached from the house and overlooking the Hudson, where Mr. Burroughs does his writing when at home; we see the rustic summer-house near by, and the Riverby vineyards, formerly husbanded by "the Vine-Dresser of Esopus,"

as his friends used to call him; now by his son Julian, who combines, like his father before him, grape-growing with essay-writing.

A pleasant hour is spent in the artistic little cottage, planned and built by the author and his son, where live Mr. Julian Burroughs and his family. Here the grandfather has many a frolic with his three grandchildren, who know him as "Baba." John Burroughs the younger is his special pride. Who knows but the naturalist stands somewhat in awe of his grandson?--for as the youngster reaches for his "Teddy," and says sententiously, "Bear!" the elder never ventures a word about the dangers of "sham natural history."

Boarding the West Sh.o.r.e train, laden with fruit and beechnuts and pleasant memories, we return to the city's roar and whirl, dreaming still of the calls of chickadees in the bare woods and of quiet hours before the fire at Slabsides.

BACK TO PEPACTON

There has always been a haunting suggestiveness to me about the expression _Rue du Temps Perdu_--the Street of Lost Time. Down this shadowy vista we all come to peer with tear-dimmed eyes sooner or later.

Usually this pensive retrospection is the premonitory sign that one is nearing the last milestone before the downhill side of life begins.

But to some this yearning backward glance comes early; they feel its compelling power while still in the vigor of middle life. Why this is so it is not easy to say, but imaginative, brooding natures who live much in their emotions are p.r.o.ne to this chronic homesickness for the Past, this ever-recurring, mournful retrospect, this tender, wistful gaze into the years that are no more.

It is this tendency in us all as we grow older that makes us drift back to the scenes of our youth; it satisfies a deep-seated want to look again upon the once familiar places. We seek them out with an eagerness wholly wanting in ordinary pursuits. The face of the fields, the hills, the streams, the house where one was born--how they are invested with something that exists nowhere else, wander where we will! In their midst memories come crowding thick and fast; things of moment, critical episodes, are mingled with the most trivial happenings; smiles and tears and sighs are curiously blended as we stroll down the Street of Lost Time.

While we are all more or less under this spell of the Past, some natures are more particularly enthralled by it, even in the very zenith of life, showing it to be of temperamental origin rather than the outcome of the pa.s.sing years. Of such a temperament is John Burroughs. Now, when the snows of five-and-seventy winters have whitened his head, we do not wonder when we hear him say, "Ah! the Past! the Past has such a hold on me!" But even before middle life he experienced this yearning, even then confessed that he had for many years viewed everything in the light of the afternoon's sun--"a little faded and diluted, and with a pensive tinge." "It almost amounts to a disease," he reflects, "this homesickness which home cannot cure--a strange complaint. Sometimes when away from the old scenes it seems as if I must go back to them, as if I should find the old contentment and satisfaction there in the circle of the hills. But I know I should not--the soul's thirst can never be slaked. My hunger is the hunger of the imagination. Bring all my dead back again, and place me amid them in the old home, and a vague longing and regret would still possess me."

As early as his forty-fifth birthday he wrote in his Journal: "Indeed, the Past begins to grow at my back like a great pack, and it seems as if it would overwhelm me quite before I get to be really an old man.

As time pa.s.ses, the world becomes more and more a Golgotha,--a place of graves,--even if one does not actually lose by death his friends and kindred. The days do not merely pa.s.s, we bury them; they are of us, like us, and in them we bury our own image, a real part of ourselves."

Perhaps, among the poems of Mr. Burroughs, next to "Waiting" the verses that have the most universal appeal are those of--

THE RETURN

He sought the old scenes with eager feet-- The scenes he had known as a boy; "Oh, for a draught of those fountains sweet, And a taste of that vanished joy!"

He roamed the fields, he wooed the streams, His school-boy paths essayed to trace; The orchard ways recalled his dreams, The hills were like his mother's face.

Oh, sad, sad hills! Oh, cold, cold hearth!

In sorrow he learned this truth-- One may return to the place of his birth, He cannot go back to his youth.

But a half-loaf is better than no bread, and Mr. Burroughs has now yielded to this deep-seated longing for his boyhood scenes, and has gone back to the place of his birth amid the Catskills; and one who sees him there during the midsummer days--alert, energetic, curious concerning the life about him--is almost inclined to think he has literally gone back to his youth as well, for the boy in him is always coming to the surface.

It was on the watershed of the Pepacton (the East Branch of the Delaware), in the town of Roxbury, Delaware County, New York, that John Burroughs was born, and there that he gathered much of the harvest of his earlier books; it was there also that most of his more recent books were written. Although he left the old scenes in his youth, his heart has always been there. He went back many years ago and named one of his books ("Pepacton") from the old stream, and he has now gone back and arranged for himself a simple summer home on the farm where he first saw the light.

Most of his readers have heard much of Slabsides, the cabin in the wooded hills back of the Hudson, and of his conventional home, Riverby, at West Park, New York; but as yet the public has heard little of his more remote retreat on his native heath.

(Ill.u.s.tration of Woodchuck Lodge and Barn. From a photograph by Charles S. Olcott)

For several years it has been his custom to slip away to the old home in Delaware County on one pretext or another--to boil sap in the old sugar bush and rejoice in the April frolic of the robins; to meander up Montgomery Hollow for trout; to gather wild strawberries in the June meadows and hobn.o.b with the bobolinks; to saunter in the hemlocks in quest of old friends in the tree-tops; and--yes, truth compels me to confess--to sit in the fields with rifle in hand and wage war against the burrowing woodchuck which is such a menace to the clover and vegetables of the farmer.

In the summer of 1908, Mr. Burroughs rescued an old dwelling fast going to decay which stood on the farm a half-mile from the Burroughs homestead, and there, with friends, camped out for a few weeks, calling the place, because of the neighbors who most frequented it, "Camp Monax," or, in homelier language, "Woodchuck Lodge." In the succeeding summers he has spent most of his time there. Though repairing and adding many improvements, he has preserved the simple, primitive character of the old house, has built a roomy veranda across its front, made tables, bookcases, and other furniture of simple rustic character, and there in summer he dwells with a few friends, as contented and serene a man as can be found in this complicated world of to-day. There his old friends seek him out, and new ones come to greet him. Artists and sculptors paint and model him, and photographers carry away souvenirs of their pilgrimages.

In order to withdraw himself completely during his working hours from the domestic life, Mr. Burroughs inst.i.tuted a study in the hay-barn, a few rods up the hill from the house. A rough box, the top of which is covered with manilla paper, an old hickory chair, and a hammock const.i.tute his furnishings. The hay carpet and overflowing haymows yield a fragrance most acceptable to him, and through the great doorway he looks out upon the unfrequented road and up to Old Clump, the mountain in the lap of which his father's farm is cradled, the mountain which he used to climb to salt the sheep, the mountain which is the haunt of the hermit thrush. (His nieces and nephews at the old home always speak of this songster as "Uncle John's bird.")

(Ill.u.s.tration of Mr. Burroughs in the Hay-Barn Study, Woodchuck Lodge.

From a photograph by R. J. H. DeLoach)

As I watched Mr. Burroughs start out morning after morning with his market-basket of ma.n.u.scripts on his arm, and briskly walk to his rude study, I asked myself, "Is there another literary man anywhere, now that Tolstoy has gone, who is so absolutely simple and unostentatious in tastes and practice as is John Burroughs?" How he has learned to strip away the husks and get at the kernels! How superbly he ignores non-essentials! how free he is from the tyranny of things! There in the comfort of the hills among which his life began, with his friends around him, he rejoices in the ever-changing face of Nature, enjoys the fruits of his garden, his forenoons of work, and the afternoons when friends from near and far walk across the fields, or drive, or motor up to Woodchuck Lodge; and best of all, he enjoys the peace that evening brings--those late afternoon hours when the shadow of Old Clump is thrown on the broad mountain-slope across the valley, and when the long, silvery notes of the vesper sparrow chant "Peace, goodwill, and then good-night." As the shadows deepen, he is wont to carry his Victor out to the stone wall and let the music from Brahms's "Cradle Song" or Schubert's "Serenade" float to us as we sit on the veranda, hushed into humble grat.i.tude for our share in this quiet life.

To see Mr. Burroughs daily amid these scenes; to realize how they are a part of him, and how inimitably he has transferred them to his books; to roam over the pastures, follow the spring paths, linger by the stone walls he helped to build, sit with him on the big rock in the meadow where as a boy he sat and dreamed; to see him in the everyday life--hoeing in the garden, tiptoeing about the house preparing breakfast while his guests are lazily dozing on the veranda; to eat his corn-cakes, or the rice-flour pudding with its wild strawberry accompaniment; to see him rocking his grandson in the old blue cradle in which he himself was rocked; to picnic in the beech woods with him, climb toward Old Clump at sunset and catch the far-away notes of the hermit; to loll in the hammocks under the apple trees, or to sit in the glow of the Franklin stove of a cool September evening while he and other philosophic or scientific friends discuss weighty themes; to hear his sane, wise, and often humorous comments on the daily papers, and his absolutely independent criticism of books and magazines--to witness and experience all this, and more, is to enjoy a privilege so rare that I feel selfish unless I try to share it, in a measure, with less fortunate friends of Our Friend.

(Ill.u.s.tration of Cradle in which John Burroughs was rocked. From a photograph by Dr. John D. Johnson)

It has been my good fortune to spend many delightful summers with Mr.

Burroughs at his old home, and also at Woodchuck Lodge. On my first visit he led me to a hilltop and pointed off toward a deep gorge where the Pepacton, although it is a placid stream near Roxbury, rises amid scenery wild and rugged. It drains this high pastoral country, where the farms hang upon the mountainsides or lie across the long, sloping hills.

The look of those farms impressed me as the fields of England impressed Mr. Burroughs--"as though upon them had settled an atmosphere of ripe and loving husbandry." I was often reminded in looking upon them of that line of Emerson's: "The day, immeasurably long, sleeps over the wide, warm fields." There is a fresh, blue, cleansed appearance to the hills, "like a newly-washed lamp chimney," as Mr. Burroughs sometimes said.

Our writer's overmastering attachment to his birthplace seems due largely to the fact that the springs, the hills, and the wooded mountains are inextricably blended with his parents and his youth. As he has somewhere said, "One's own landscape comes in time to be a sort of outlying part of him; he has sown himself broadcast upon it... planted himself in the fields, builded himself in the stone walls, and evoked the sympathy of the hills in his struggle."

From a hilltop he pointed off to the west and said, "Yonder is the direction that my grandparents came, in the 1790's, from Stamford, cutting a road through the woods, and there, over Batavia Hill, Father rode when he went courting Mother."

Then we went up the tansy-bordered road, past the little graveyard, and over to the site where his grandfather's first house stood. As we wandered about the old stone foundations, his reminiscences were interrupted by the discovery of a junco's nest. On the way back he pointed across the wide valley to the West Settlement schoolhouse where he and his brothers used to go, although his first school was in a little stone building which is still standing on the outskirts of Roxbury, and known thereabouts as "the old stone jug." Mr. Burroughs remembers his first day in this school, and the little suit he wore, of bluish striped cotton, with epaulets on the shoulders which flopped when he ran. He fell asleep one day and tumbled off the seat, cutting his head; he was carried to a neighboring farmhouse, and he still vividly recalls the smell of camphor which pervaded the room when he regained consciousness. He was about four years of age. He remembers learning his "A-b ab's," as they were called, and just how the column of letters looked in the old spelling-book; remembers sitting on the floor under the desks and being called out once in a while to say his letters: "Hen Meeker, a boy bigger than I was, stuck on _e_. I can remember the teacher saying to him; 'And you can't tell that? Why, little Johnny Burroughs can tell you what it is. Come, Johnny.' And I crawled out and went up and said it was e, like a little man."

Up the hill a short distance from the old homestead he indicated the "turn 'n the road," as it pa.s.ses by the "Deacon Woods"; this, he said, was his first journey into the world. He was about four years old when, running away, he got as far as this turn; then, looking back and seeing how far he was from the house, he became frightened and ran back crying.

"I have seen a young robin," he added, "do the very same thing on its first journey from the nest."