Part 1 (1/2)

My Boyhood

by John Burroughs

FOREWORD

In the beginning, at least, Father wrote these sketches of his boyhood and early farm life as a matter of self-defense: I had made a deter on as to hiround, for as he once said in a letter to me, ”You will be homesick; I know just how I felt when I left hoo And I have been more or less homesick ever since

The love of the old hills and of Father and Mother is deep in the very foundations of ” He had an intense love of his birthplace and cherished every meh up on the side of Old Clu”--so that when I tried to write of him he felt it was ties are the result

JULIAN BURROUGHS

WAITING

Serene, I fold my hands and wait, Nor care for wind, nor tide, nor sea; I rave no ainst Time or Fate, For lo! my own shall come to me

I stay er pace?

I stand amid the eternal ways, And what is ht or day, The friends I seek are seeking e the tide of destiny

Whatyears; My heart shall reap where it hath sown, And garner up its fruit of tears

The waters know their own, and draw The brook that springs in yonder heights; So flows the good with equal law Unto the soul of pure delights

The stars cohtly to the sky; The tidal wave coh, Can keep my oay from ive you some account of my life--hoith me, and now in my seventy-sixth year I find h aboutnarrative or of any great historical value It is mainly the life of a country man and a rather obscure ely lived apart froiven character to the last three quarters of a century Like tens of thousands of others, I have been a spectator of, rather than a participator in, the activities--political, coical, scientific--of the times in which I have lived My life, like your own, has been along the by-paths rather than along the great public highways I have known but few great reat public events--not even in the Civil War which I lived through and in which my duty plainly called me to take part I am a man who recoils from noise and strife, even from fair competition, and who likes to see his days ”linked each to each” by soenial occupation

The first seventeen years of my life were spent on the farm where I was born (1837-1854); the next ten years I was a teacher in rural district schools (1854-1864); then I was for ten years a governton (1864-1873); then in the summer of 1873, while a national bank examiner and bank receiver, I purchased the sht up and where I have since lived, cultivating the land for marketable fruit and the fields and woods for nature literature, as you well know I have gotten out of hways of travel--have been twice to Europe, going only as far as Paris (1871 and 1882)--the first time sent to London by the Government with three other men to convey 50,000,000 of bonds to be refunded; the second ti with my family on my own account I was a member of the Harri as far as Plover Bay on the extreme N E part of Siberia I was the companion of President Roosevelt on a trip to Yellowstone Park in the spring of 1903 In the winter and spring of 1909 I went to California with tomen friends and extended the journey to the Hawaiian Islands, returning hoain crossed the continent to California I have camped and tramped in Maine and in Canada, and have spent part of a winter in Bermuda and in Jamaica This is an outline of reat men I met Carlyle in the company of Moncure Conway in London in November, 1871 I met Emerson three times--in 1863 at West Point; in 1871 in Baltiton, where I heard him lecture; and at the Holmes birthday breakfast in Boston in 1879 I knew Walt Whitman intimately from 1863 until his death in 1892 I have fellow or Bryant; I have seen Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, Early, Sumner, Garfield, Cleveland, and other notable men of those days I heard Tyndall deliver his course of lectures on Light in Washi+ngton in 1870 or '71, buthis visit here I dined with the Rossettis in London in 1871, but was not impressed by them nor they by me I met Matthew Arnold in New York and heard his lecture on Emerson My books are, in a way, a record of my life--that part of it that came to flower and fruit in my mind You could reconstruct leans his literary harvest in the fields and woods reaps mainly where he has sown his from the seed of his own heart

My life has been a fortunate one; I was born under a lucky star It seems as if both wind and tide had favoured reat losses, or defeats, or illness, or accidents, and have undergone no great struggles or privations; I have had no grouch, I have not wanted the earth I aht, but by day I am a confirmed optimist, and it is the days that have staood corner of the universe to live in and I ae it for any other I hope the joy of living may be as keen with you, my dear boy, as it has been with me and that you may have life on as easy terin the record in an inborn on a farm, of parents in the priood luck, too, that s find it good to begin life Father probably tapped the sugar bush about this ti sparrowin the barn and young lambs under the shed There were earth-stained snow drifts on the hillside, and along the stone walls and through the forests that covered the enerally bare and the frost was leaving the ground The stress of winter was over and the waran to be felt in the air I had coirls and three boys, the oldest ten years and the youngest two One had died in infancy,me the seventh child Mother enty-nine and father thirty-five, avery plainly the Celtic or Welsh strain in his blood, as did mother, as a Kelly and of Irish extraction on the paternal side I had cos were looked upon in those days, but a fa for and ie far, broad-backed hills and gentle flowing eneration from the stuered in many of the fields late intoweather was to burn these stumps--an occupation I always enjoyed because the adventure of it made play of the work The cli to 30 below, though we then had no thermometer to measure it, and the summers, at an altitude of two thousand feet, cool and salubrious The soil was fairly good, though encumbered with the laminated rock and stones of the Catskill formation, which the old ice sheet had broken and shouldered and transported about About every five or six acres had loose stones and rock enough to put a rock-bottoh in and on the soil to worry the plough in the valleys and bending up and over the broad-backed hills are checker-boards of stone walls, and the right-angled fields, in their ive a striking rain, such as rye, oats, buckwheat, and yellow corn, are grown, but grass is thecountry and the dairy cow thrives there, and her products are the chief source of the incomes of the farms

I had come into a home where all the eleood as there is in the world, and where the conditions of life were of a temper to discipline both mind and body The settlers of ely fro in after or near the close of the Revolution, and with a good randfather, Ephraiht or ten children, from near Danbury, Conn, and settled in the town of Stamford shortly after the Revolution He died there in 1818 My grandfather, Eden, came into the town of Roxbury, then a part of Ulster County

I had co with milk, if not with honey The ar ar the principal sweetening used in the family Maple, beech, and birch wood kept us warm in winter, and pine and herew in the deeper valleys formed the roofs and the walls of the houses The breath of kine early led with my own breath From my earliest memory the coas the chief factor on the farm and her products the main source of the fa It was for her that we toiled fro the hay into the barns or into the stacks,it by hand

That was the day of the scythe and the good ood cradler, of the pitchfork and the good pitcher With the athered noith less than half the outlay of huy, but the type of farmer seems to have deteriorated in about the saeneration of far of tea, or the third crop of corn where no fertilizers have been used The large, picturesque, and original characters who ione, and their descendants have deserted the farms or are distinctly of an inferior type The far to the arain consuone out entirely, and the social and the neighbourhood spirit is not the sas or ”bees” of any sort The telephone and the rural free delivery have come and the automobile and the daily newspaper The roads are better, communication quicker, and the houses and barns more showy, but the men and the women, and especially the children, are not there The towns and the cities are now colouring and do the country which they have depleted of itsa faded replica of town life

The farm work to which I was early called upon to lend a hand, as I have said, revolved around the dairy cow Her paths were in the fields and woods, her sonorous voice was upon the hills, her fragrant breath was upon every breeze She was the centre of our industries To keep her in good condition, well pastured in summer and well housed and fed in winter, and the whole dairy up to its highest point of efficiency--to this end the far occupation

In su; and in winter it began with the foddering and ended with the foddering, and theboth seasons had for its object, directly or indirectly, the well-being of the herd Getting the cows and turning away the cows in su the them back in winter was usually the work of the older The foddering them from the stack in the field in winter also fell to the lot of the olderwe all took a hand e had reached the age of about ten years, Mother andtheir share At first wethe pails of milk on the stone work; later we milked them in a yard in the orchard behind the house, and of late years theis done in the stable