Part 14 (2/2)

Mr Burroughs showed me the old rosebush in the pasture, all that was left to mark the site where a house had once stood; even before his boyhood days this house had becoh, had always been a joy to him, and had played such a part in his early days that he had transplanted some of the old bush to a spot near his doorsteps at Slabsides Once when he sent me some of the roses he wrote of them thus: ”The roses of my boyhood! Take the first barefooted country lad you see with hoed straw hat, and put some of these roses in his hand, and you see o They are the identical roses, mind you

Sometirew”

One day we followed the course he and his brothers and sisters used to take on their way to school Leaving the highway near the old graveyard, ent down across a h the pastures in the valley along which a trout brook used to flow, on across lected orchard was, till we came to where the little old schoolhouse itself stood

How these trout streas, too, were spent there He spoke feelingly of the one that coursed through the he itself in the dusky, fragrant depths of the hemlocks” They used to play hookey down at Stratton Falls, too, and get the green streaks in the old red sandstone rocks totheh not to scratch their slates The woods have been greatly mutilated in which they used to loiter on the way to school and gather crinkle-root to eat with their lunches,--though they usually ate it all up before lunch-tihs speaks of a school way to go over a hill and through a wood, and it is getting dark” This was his brother Wilson, and he doubtless had into school

This school (where Jay Gould was his playe A rather curious reciprocal help these two lads gave each other--especially curious in the light of their subsequent careers as writer and financier The boy John Burroughs was one day feeling very uncomfortable because he could not furnish a coht lines only were sufficient if the task was completed on time, but the ti kept after school to write twelve lines In this extre doggerel:--

”Ti fast, I, minus two, as you all know, But what is ht, Or stay and write

Just eight I've got But you know that's not Enough lacking four, But to have twelve It wants no more”

”I have never been able to hs A few years later, when Jay Gould was hard up (he had left school and was hs helped hihty cents The books were a Gery” The eet the cash, and the e the books

Mr Burroughs loves to look off toward Montgomery Hollow and talk of the old haunt ”I've takenof trout from that stream,” he would say One day he and his brother Curtis and I drove over there and fished the streaon the last half-eted every little while ”Not yet, John,--not yet,” said the h the rapid mountain brook seemed just the place for trout, the trout were not in their places I shall long reh shelving rocks sheltering thebeside the streaerness of one of the fisher his hook into the pools Occasionally he would relinquish the rod, putting it intopool; but I was ly spared the rod to the eager angler And even he secured only two troutling to carry back in his led about the roots of randfather Kelly's ardor for the pasti the fields near the old horandfather tarried the last tirandfather past eighty As they rested on the wall, the oldit, sat on the lad's hand as it lay on the wall ”It hurt,” Mr Burroughs said, ”but I didn't reat pleasure to go through the old sap bush with Mr

Burroughs, for there he always lives over again the days in early spring when sugar-ress He shohere sorandmother trees,--and hty , and each recalls youthful experiences He so to re-create the idyllic days Their ways of boiling sap are different now, and he finds less poetry in the process But the look of the old trees, the laugh of the robins, and the soft nasal calls of the nuthatch, he says, are the sanore the years!” he exclaimed as a nuthatch piped in the near-by trees

Soe froar froar cookies such as his ly of sweets nowadays Yet, when he and a small boy would clear the table and take the food down cellar, it was no unco one of those fat cookies, their eyes twinkling at the thought that they had found the forbidden sweets we had hidden so carefully

He and this lad of eleven were great chu honey on the stone wall, getting a line on the bees; shelled beechnuts and cracked butternuts for the chipht skunks in a trap, just to demonstrate that a skunk can be carried by the tail with i one day, got the worst of the bargain the next); and waged war early and late on the flabby woodchucks which one could see al across the fields We called these boys ”John of Woods,”

and ”John of Woodchucks”; and it was sometimes difficult to say which was the veriest boy, the one of eleven or the one of seventy-four

One ether as they were doing up the breakfast work Calling out to learn the cause of their --he had just found it in his coat-pocket, having put it in there to carry fro-room

He often amused us by his recital of Thackeray's absurd ”Little Billee,”

and by the application of soe

(Illustration of Living-Roohs Frorew longer and cooler, ould gather about the table and Mr Burroughs would read aloud, soson's ”Creative Evolution,” under the spell of which he was the entire summer of 1911, solish poet has touched me quite so closely,” he said, ”as Wordsworth But his poetry has e special and personal, to a comparatively small circle of readers” As he read ”The Poet's Epitaph” one evening, I was i likeness the portrait there drawn has to Mr Burroughs:--

”The outward shows of sky and earth, Of hill and valley, he has viewed; And impulses of deeper birth Have cos that round us lie Some random truths he can impart,-- The harvest of a quiet eye That broods and sleeps on his own heart”

What are the books, and notably the later philosophical essays, of Mr

Burroughs but the ”harvest of a quiet eye”? His ”Summit of the Years,”