Part 14 (1/2)
”One ofon the hearth one evening to catch crickets that Mother said ate holes in our stockings--big, light-colored, long-legged house crickets, with long horns; one would ju way
”Another early recollection comes to me: one su skyward, I saw a great hawk sailing round in big circles I was suddenly seized with a panic of fear and hid behind the stone wall
”The very earliest recollection of, I looked up on the sidehill and saw Father with a bag slung across his shoulders, striding across the furroing grain It was a war day, and as I looked hillistfully, I wished Father would co s, but how they stick in thethis cradle,” said Mr Burroughs, as he indicated the quaint blue wooden cradle (which I had found in ruh the attic at the old ho the baby while Mother bakes oron the work of the farm”
Most of the soil in Delaware County is deco of this soil Mr Burroughs said, ”In the spring when the plough has turned the turf, I have seen the breasts of these broad hills glow like the breasts of robins” He is fond of studying the geology of the region now I have seen hilacier tracings, and then explain to his grandchildren how the glaciers ages ago es in his recent book ”Tie” is one wherein he describes the look of repose and serenity of his native hills, ”as if the fret and fever of life were long since passed with thee in which he looks at his hoist, but with the vision of the poet--the inner eye which assuredly yields hi as we sat in the kitchen at the old ho of the olden days: ”I see the great splint basket with the long frying-pan handle thrust through its ears across the top, held down by two chairs on either end, and two ofthe ears of corn against the iron I hear the kernels rattle, a shower of the out in the room With the cobs that lie in a pile beside the basket I build houses, carrying them up till they topple, or till one of the shelters knocks the on the back of a chair Winter reigns without How it all comes up beforeover a thing which had caused hier boy--”the meanest boy I ever knew, and he beca under a tree in the corner of the school-yard; he bribedabout, but as soon as I had told hi my secret to the other boys”
One day ent 'cross lots after speare, and an abandoned house near the hs the first time he had heard the word ”taste” used, except in reference to food The wo at his ho, had said, ”What taste that boy has!” ”It made me open my eyes--'taste'!--then there was another kind of taste than the one I knew about--the taste of things I ate!”
At a place in the road near the old stone schoolhouse, he showed me where, as a lad of thirteen, perhaps, he had stopped to watch so the road, and had first heard the word ”antiquities” used ”They had uncovered and ree flat stone, and under it were other stones, probably arranged by the hands of earlier road, said, as they exposed the earlier layers, 'Ah! here are antiquities!' The wordimpression on me”
(Illustration of View of the Catskills froraph by Charles S Olcott)
One of our favorite walks at sunset was up the hill beyond the old horaveyard Froiants--Double Top and Mount Grahahs He told how, even in his early teens, at dusk, he would tiptoe around the corner past the graveyard, afraid to run for fear a gang of ghosts would be at his heels ”When I got down the road a ways, though, hoould run!” He was always ”scairy” if he had to cohtfall, and was even afraid of the big black hole under the barn in the daytiht lurk there in that great black abyss, and would hustle throughlike Hercules, and often sending in 'Cuff,' the dog, to scare 'eoblins in childhood, his active, sensitive irow sorown-up boy waxed so bold that he sat in the barn with its black hole underneath and wrote of ”The Phanto Herculean in his task; he looked boldly down into the black abys, it is true, saw the ”huge first Nothing,” faced the spectres as they rose before him, wrestled with the each phantom as a friendly power--a creature on whose shoulders he had raised hih the blackness was peopled with uncouth and gigantic for Man, who could put all creatures under his feet
Along the road between the old hoiant stairs” of his childhood On these he played, and he is fond now of pausing and resting there as he recalls events of those days
”Are these rocks very old?” some one asked him one day
”Oh, yes; they've been here since Adam was a kitten”
Whichever way he turns, memories of early days awaken; as he himself has somewhere said in print, ”there is a deposit of him all over the landscape where he has lived”
As we have learned, Mr Burroughs seems to have been more alive than his brothers and playmates, to have had wider interests and activities
When, a lad, he saw his first warbler in the ”Deacon Woods,” the black-throated blue-back, he was excited and curious as to what the strange bird could be (so like a visitant from another clime it seemed); the other boys met his queries with indifference, but for him it was the event of the day; it was far more, it was the keynote to all his days; it opened his eyes to the life about hiht in the ”Deacon Woods,” were such exquisite creatures! It fired hi warbler! How far its little wings have carried it! What an influence it has had on American literature, and on the lives of readers for the past fifty years, sending the their eyes to the beauty that is co the Giver of all good that a little barefoot boy noted the warbler that spring day as it flitted about in the beeches wood Life has been sweeter and richer because of it
Down the road a piece is the place where this boy s On this very rock where we sit he used to catch the flying grasshoppers early of an Augustbrown fellows that fly like birds”; they would congregate here during the night to avail themselves of the warmth of the rocks, and here he would stop on his way fro
Yonder in the field by a stone wall, under a , in his early twenties he read Schlemiel's ”Philosophy of History,” one of the volumes which, when a youth, he had found in an old bookstall in New York, on the occasion of his first trip there
”Off there through e used to call the 'Long Woods' lies the road along which Father used to travel in the autumn when he took his butter to Catskill, fifty o, I was in a great state of excitement for a week beforehand, for fear my clothes would not be ready, or else it would be too cold, or that the world would coh on a spring-seat, I hts and wonders than I have ever seen on a journey since”
On the drive up froe he showed me the place, a mile or more from their haunts on the breezy mountain lands, where the sheep were driven annually to be washed It was a deep pool then, and a gristmill stood near by He said he could see now the huddled sheep, and the overhanging rocks with the phoebes' nests in the crevices
”Down in the Hollow,” as they call the village of Robbery, he drewwhich was once the old acade to school He ree one evening to hear a man, McLaurie, talk up the academy before there was one in Roxbury ”I re e were there I was the only boy I've wondered since what possessedit would be to boys of that vicinity, pointing , 'Now, like that boy, there' I recall how I dropped my head and blushed He was a small man, very o, it gave ht it, and had a successful school there for several years, but I never got there The school in the West Settleh forof it, impressed it and him upon me more, perhaps, than the boys who really ere io down there to the school exhibitions!
It was after that that I hadto Harpersfield Seh Father had proo, when the tio back on his word, but there was very littleso well as they did with so little”
”As a boy it had been instilled intohi this field when it began to thunder Ras turned up his lips to the clouds conte in expectation of the avenging thunderbolt What a revelation it hen he was not struck! I ian to think, 'Now, ht'; but it seeht to have been offended by such an act”