Our Friend John Burroughs Part 5

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.

(Ill.u.s.tration 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 antic.i.p.ate 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 pa.s.sing 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 ma.s.ses, 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 ma.s.s 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 b.u.t.t 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 b.u.mblebees, 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 Th.o.r.eau, 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 cla.s.sroom 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 cla.s.sroom 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 ma.s.s 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 a.s.sociation 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 gra.s.s, yielding good pasture, divided east and west by parallel stone walls; this hill, or lower slope of the mountain, was one of the princ.i.p.al 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 a.s.sociations 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 ba.s.swood 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 s...o...b..nks 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 st.u.r.dy 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 a.s.sociations, 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.

Time has worn down the hills and mountains so that all the outlines of the country are gentle and flowing. The valleys are long, open, and wide; the hills broad and smooth, no angles or abruptness, or sharp contrasts anywhere. Hence it is not what is called a picturesque land--full of bits of scenery that make the artist's fingers itch. The landscape has great repose and gentleness, so far as long, sweeping lines and broad, smooth slopes can give this impression. It is a land which has never suffered violence at the hands of the interior terrestrial forces; nothing is broken or twisted or contorted or thrust out or up abruptly. The strata are all horizontal, and the steepest mountain-slopes clothed with soil that nourishes large forest growths.

I stayed at home, working on the farm in summer and going to school in winter, till I was seventeen. From the time I was fourteen I had had a desire to go away to school. I had a craving for knowledge which my brothers did not share. One fall when I was about fifteen I had the promise from Father that I might go to school at the Academy in the village that winter. But I did not go. Then the next fall I had the promise of going to the Academy at Harpersfield, where one of the neighbor's boys, d.i.c.k Van d.y.k.e, went. How I dreamed of Harpersfield!

That fall I did my first ploughing, stimulated to it by the promise of Harpersfield. It was in September, in the lot above the sugar bush--cross-ploughing, to prepare the ground for rye. How many days I ploughed, I do not remember; but Harpersfield was the lure at the end of each furrow, I remember that. To this day I cannot hear the name without seeing a momentary glow upon my mental horizon--a finger of enchantment is for an instant laid upon me.

But I did not go to Harpersfield. When the time drew near for me to go, Father found himself too poor, or the expense looked too big--none of the other boys had had such privileges, and why should I? So I swallowed my disappointment and attended the home district school for another winter. Yet I am not sure but I went to Harpersfield after all. The desire, the yearning to go, the effort to make myself worthy to go, the mental awakening, and the high dreams, were the main matter. I doubt if the reality would have given me anything more valuable than these things. The aspiration for knowledge opens the doors of the mind and makes ready for her coming.

These were my first and last days at the plough, and they made that field memorable to me. I never cross it now but I see myself there--a callow youth being jerked by the plough-handles but with my head in a cloud of alluring day-dreams. This, I think, was in the fall of 1853. I went to school that winter with a view to leaving home in the spring to try my luck at school-teaching in an adjoining county. Many Roxbury boys had made their first start in the world by going to Ulster County to teach a country school. I would do the same. So, late in March, 1854, about the end of the sugar season, I set out for Olive, Ulster County.

An old neighbor, Dr. Hull, lived there, and I would seek him.

There was only a stage-line at that time connecting the two counties, and that pa.s.sed twelve miles from my home. My plan was to cross the mountain into Red Kill to Uncle Martin Kelly's, pa.s.s the night there, and in the morning go to Clovesville, three miles distant, and take the stage. How well I remember that walk across the mountain in a snow-squall through which the sun shone dimly, a black oilcloth satchel in my hand, and in my heart vague yearnings and forebodings! I had but a few dollars in my pocket, probably six or seven, most of which I had earned by selling maple sugar. Father was willing I should go, though my help was needed on the farm.

Well, I traversed the eight miles to my uncle's in good time, and in the morning he drove me down to the turnpike to take the stage. I remember well my anxious and agitated state of mind while waiting at the hotel for the arrival of the stage. I had never ridden in one, I am not sure that I had even seen one, and I did not know just what was expected of me, or just how I should deport myself. An untraveled farm boy at seventeen is such a vague creature anyway, and I was, in addition, such a bundle of sensibilities, timidities, and embarra.s.sments as few farm boys are. I paid my fare at the hotel at the rate of a sixpence a mile for about thirty-two miles, and when the stage came, saw my name entered upon the "waybill," and got aboard with a beating heart.

Of that first ride of my life in a public conveyance, I remember little.

The stage was one of those old-fashioned rocking Concord coaches, drawn by four horses. We soon left the snow-clad hills of Delaware County behind, and dropped down into the milder climate of Ulster, where no snow was to be seen. About three in the afternoon the stage put me down at Terry's Tavern on the "plank-road" in Olive. I inquired the way to Dr. Hull's and found the walk of about a mile an agreeable change. The doctor and his wife welcomed me cordially. They were old friends of my family. I spent a day with them, riding about with the doctor on his visits to patients, and making inquiries for a school in want of a teacher. On the third day we heard of a vacancy in a district in the west end of the town, seven or eight miles distant, called Tongore.

Hither I walked one day, saw the trustees, and made my application. I suspect my youth and general greenness caused them to hesitate; they would consider and let me know inside of a week. So, in a day or two, hearing of no other vacancies, I returned home the same way I had come.

It was the first day of April when I made the return trip. I remember this because at one of the hotels where we changed horses I saw a copper cent lying upon the floor, and, stooping to pick it up, found it nailed fast. The bartender and two or three other spectators had a quiet chuckle at my expense. Before the week was out a letter came from the Tongore trustees saying I could have the school; wages, ten dollars the first month, and, if I proved satisfactory, eleven for the other five months, and "board around."

I remember the handwriting of that letter as if I had received it but yesterday. "Come at your earliest opportunity." How vividly I recall the round hand in which those words were written! I replied that I would be on hand the next week, ready to open school on Monday, the 11th.

Again I took the stage, my father driving me twelve miles to Dimmock's Corners to meet it, a trip which he made with me many times in after years. Mother always getting up and preparing our breakfast long before daylight. We were always in a more or less anxious frame of mind upon the road lest we be too late for the stage, but only once during the many trips did we miss it. On that occasion it had pa.s.sed a few minutes before we arrived, but, knowing it stopped for breakfast at Griffin's Corners, four or five miles beyond, I hastened on afoot, running most of the way, and arrived in sight of it just as the driver had let off the first crack from his whip to start his reluctant horses. My shouting was quickly pa.s.sed to him by the onlookers, he pulled up, and I won the race quite out of breath.

On the present occasion we were in ample time, and my journey ended at Shokan, from which place I walked the few miles to Tongore, in the late April afternoon. The little frogs were piping, and I remember how homesick the familiar spring sound made me. As I walked along the road near sundown with this sound in my ears, I saw coming toward me a man with a gait as familiar as was the piping of the frogs. He turned out to be our neighbor Warren Scudder, and how delighted I was to see him in that lonesome land! He had sold a yoke of oxen down there and had been down to deliver them. The home ties pulled very strongly at sight of him. Warren's three boys, Reub and Jack and Smith, were our nearest boy neighbors. His father, old Deacon Scudder, was one of the notable characters of the town. Warren himself had had some varied experiences.

He was one of the leaders in the anti-rent war of ten years before.

Indeed, he was chief of the band of "Indians" that shot Steel, the sheriff, at Andes, and it was charged that the bullet from his pistol was the one that did the fatal work. At any rate, he had had to flee the country, escaping concealed in a peddler's cart, while close pressed by the posse. He went South and was absent several years. After the excitement of the murder and the struggle between the two factions had died down, he returned and was not molested. And here he was in the April twilight, on my path to Tongore, and the sight of him cheered my heart.

I began my school Monday morning, April the 11th, 1854, and continued it for six months, teaching the common branches to twenty or thirty pupils from the ages of six to twelve or thirteen. I can distinctly recall the faces of many of those boys and girls to this day--Jane North, a slender, clean-cut girl of ten or eleven; Elizabeth McClelland, a fat, freckled girl of twelve; Alice Twilliger, a thin, talkative girl with a bulging forehead. Two or three of the boys became soldiers in the Civil War, and fell in the battle of Gettysburg.

(In April, 1912, Mr. Burroughs received the following: "Hearty congratulations upon your seventy-fifth birthday, from your old Tongore pupil of many years ago. R--B--.")

I "boarded round," going home with the children as they invited me. I was always put in the spare room, and usually treated to warm biscuit and pie for supper. A few families were very poor, and there I was lucky to get bread and potatoes. In one house I remember the bedstead was very shaky, and in the middle of the night, as I turned over, it began to sway and lurch, and presently all went down in a heap. But I clung to the wreck till morning, and said nothing about it then.