sheep; and to help gather in the flock was a part of my duty also. The
geese would submit to the plucking about as readily as the sheep to the
shearing, but they presented a much more ragged and sorry appearance
after they had been fleeced than did the sheep. It used to amuse me
to see them put their heads together and talk it over and laugh and
congratulate each other over the victory they had just won!--they had
got out of the hands of the enemy with only the loss of a few feathers
which they would not want in the warm weather! The goose is the one
inhabitant that cackles as loudly and as cheerfully over a defeat as
over a victory. They are so complacent and optimistic that it is a
comfort to me to see them about. The very silliness of the goose is a
lesson in wisdom. The pride of a plucked gander makes one take courage.
I think it quite probable that we learned our habit of hissing our
dissent from the goose, and maybe our other habit of trying sometimes to
drown an opponent with noise has a like origin. The goose is silly and
shallow-pated; yet what dignity and impressiveness in her migrating
wild clans driving in ordered ranks across the spring or autumnal skies,
linking the Chesapeake Bay and the Canadian Lakes in one flight! The
great forces are loosened and winter is behind them in one case, and the
tides of spring bear them on in the other. When I hear the trumpet of
the wild geese in the sky I know that dramatic events in the seasonal
changes are taking place.
I was the only one of the ten children who, as Father said, "took
to larnin'," though in seventy-five years of poring over books and
periodicals I have not become "learned." But I easily distanced the
other children in school. The others barely learned to read and write
and cipher a little, Curtis and Wilson barely that, Hiram got into
Greenleaf's Grammar and learned to parse, but never to write or speak
correctly, and he ciphered nearly through Dayball's Arithmetic. I went
through Dayball and then Thompkins and Perkins and got well on into
algebra in the district school. My teacher, however, when I was about
thirteen or fourteen, did not seem much impressed by my aptitude, for I
recall that he told other scholars, boys and girls of about my own
age, to get them each a grammar, but did not tell me. I felt a little
slighted but made up my mind I would have a grammar also. Father
refusing to buy it for me, I made small cakes of maple sugar in the
spring and, peddling them in the village, got money enough to buy the
grammar and other books. The teacher was a little taken aback when I
produced my book as the others did theirs, but he put me in the class
and I kept along with the rest of them, but without any idea that the
study had any practical bearing on our daily speaking and writing. That
teacher was a superior man, a graduate of the state normal school at
Albany, but I failed to impress him with my scholarly aptitudes, which
certainly were not remarkable. But long afterward, when he had read some
of my earlier magazine articles, he wrote to me, asking if I were indeed
his early farm boy pupil. His interest and commendation gave me rare
pleasure. I had at last justified that awkward intrusion into his
grammar class. Much later in life, after he had migrated to Kansas,
while on a visit East he called upon me when I chanced to be in my
native town. This gave me a still deeper pleasure. He died in Kansas
many years ago and is buried there. I have journeyed through the
state many times and always remember that it holds the ashes of my old
teacher. It is a satisfaction for me to write his name, James Oliver, in
this record.
I was in many respects an odd one in my father's family. I was like
a graft from some other tree. And this is always a disadvantage to a
man--not to be the logical outcome of what went before him, not to be
backed up by his family and inheritance--to be of the nature of a sport.
It seems as if I had more intellectual capital than I was entitled to
and robbed some of the rest of the family, while I had a full measure
of the family weaknesses. I can remember how abashed I used to be as a
child when strangers or relatives, visiting us for the first time, after
looking the rest of the children over, would ask, pointing to me, "That
is not your boy--whose is he?" I have no idea that I looked different
from the others, because I can see the family stamp upon my face very
plainly until this day. My face resembles Hiram's more than any of the
others, and I have a deeper attachment for him than for any of the rest
of my brothers. Hiram was a dreamer, too, and he had his own idealism
which expressed itself in love of bees, of which he kept many hives at
one time, and of fancy stock, sheep, pigs, poultry, and a desire to
see other lands. His bees and fancy stock never paid him, but he always
expected they would the next year. But they yielded him honey and wool
of a certain intangible, satisfying kind. To be the owner of a Cotswold
ram or ewe for which he had paid one hundred dollars or more gave him
rare satisfaction. One season, in his innocence, he took some of his
fancy sheep to the state fair at Syracuse, not knowing that an unknown
outsider stood no chance at all on such an occasion.
Hiram always had to have some sort of a plaything. Though no hunter and
an indifferent marksman, he had during his life several fancy rifles.
Once when he came to Washington to visit me, he brought his rifle with
him, carrying the naked weapon in his hand or upon his shoulder. The act
was merely the whim of a boy who likes to take his playthings with him.
Hiram certainly had not come to "shoot up" the town. In the early '60's
he had a fifty-dollar rifle made by a famous rifle maker in Utica. There
was some hitch or misunderstanding about it and Hiram made the trip to
Utica on foot. I was at home that summer and I recall seeing him start
off one June day, wearing a black coat, bent on his fifty-mile walk to
see about his pet rifle. Of course nothing came of it. The rifle maker
had Hiram's money, and he put him off with fair words; then something
happened and the gun never came to Hiram's hand.
Another plaything of his was a kettle drum with which he amused himself
in the summer twilight for many seasons. Then he got a bass drum which
Curtis learned to play, and a very warlike sound often went up from the
peaceful old homestead. When I was married and came driving home one
October twilight with my wife, the martial music began as soon as we
hove in sight of the house. Early in the Civil War, Hiram seriously
talked of enlisting as a drummer, but Father and Mother dissuaded him. I
can see what a wretched homesick boy he would have been before one week
had passed. For many years he was haunted with a desire to go West, and
made himself really believe that the next month or the month after he
would go. He kept his valise packed under his bed for more than a year,
to be ready when the impulse grew strong enough. One fall it became
strong enough to start him and carried him as far as White Pigeon,
Michigan, where it left him stranded. After visiting a cousin who lived
there he came back, and henceforth his Western fever assumed only a low,
chronic type.
I tell you all these things about Hiram because I am a chip out of the
same block and see myself in him. His vain regrets, his ineffectual
resolutions, his day-dreams, and his playthings--do I not know them
all?--only nature in some way dealt a little more liberally with me and
made many of my dreams come true. The dear brother!--he stood next to
Father and Mother to me. How many times he broke the path for me through
the winter snows on the long way to school! How faithful he was to write
to me and to visit me wherever I was, after I left home! How he longed
to follow my example and break away from the old place but could never
quite screw his courage up to the sticking point! He never read one of
my books but he rejoiced in all the good fortune that was mine. Once
when I was away at school and fell short of money, Hiram sent me a small
sum when Father could not or would not send. In later life he got it
paid back manyfold--and what a satisfaction it was to me thus to repay
him!
Hiram was always a child, he never grew up, which is true of all of us,
more or less, and true of Father also. I was an odd one, but I shared
all the family infirmities. In fact, I have always been an odd one
amid most of my human relations in life. Place me in a miscellaneous
gathering of men and I separate from them, or they from me, like oil
from water. I do not mix readily with my fellows. I am not conscious of
drawing into my shell, as the saying is, but I am conscious of a certain
strain put upon me by those about me. I suppose my shell or my skin is
too thin. Burbank experimented with walnuts trying to produce one with
a thin shell, till he finally produced one with so thin a shell that
the birds ate it up. Well, the birds eat me up for the same reason, if
I don't look out. I am social but not gregarious. I do not thrive in
clubs, I do not smoke, or tell stories, or drink, or dispute, or keep
late hours. I am usually as solitary as a bird of prey, though I trust
not for the same reason. I love so much to float on the current of my
own thoughts. I mix better with farmers, workers, and country people
generally than with professional or business men. Birds of a feather do
flock together, and if we do not feel at ease in our company we may be
sure we are in the wrong flock. Once while crossing the continent at
some station in Minnesota a gray-bearded farmer-like man got on the
train and presently began to look eagerly about the Pullman as if to see
what kind of company he was in. After a while his eye settled on me at
the other end of the car. In a few minutes he came over to me and sat
down beside me and began to tell me his story. He had come from Germany
as a young man and had lived fifty years on a farm in Minnesota and now
he was going back to visit the country of his birth. He had prospered
and had left his sons in charge of his farm. What an air he had of a boy
out of school! The adventure was warming his blood; he was going
home and he wanted someone to whom he could tell the good news. I was
probably the only real countryman in the car and he picked me out at
once, some quality of rural things hovered about us both and drew us
together. I felt that he had paid me an involuntary compliment. How
unsophisticated and communicative he was! So much so that I took it upon
myself to caution him against the men he was liable to fall in with in
New York. I should like to know if he reached the fatherland safely and
returned to his Minnesota farm.
When I was a boy six or seven years old a quack phrenologist stopped at
our house and Father kept him over night. In the morning he fingered the
bumps of all of us to pay for his lodging and breakfast. When he came to
my head I remember he grew enthusiastic. "This boy will be a rich man,"
he said. "His head beats 'em all." And he enlarged on the great wealth I
was to accumulate. I forget the rest; but that my bumps were nuggets of
gold under the quack's fingers, this I have not forgotten. The prophecy
never came true, though more money did come my way than to any of the
rest of the family. Three of my brothers, at least, were not successful
from a business point of view, and while I myself have failed in every
business venture I ever undertook--beginning with that first speculative
stroke sometime in the 'forties when, one March morning, I purchased
the prospective sap of Curtis's two maple trees for four cents; yet a
certain success from a bread-and-butter point of view has been mine.
Father took less stock in me than in the other boys--mainly, I suppose,
on account of my early proclivity for books; hence it was a deep
satisfaction to me, when his other sons had failed him and loaded the
old farm with debt, that I could come back and be able to take the
burden of the debts upon myself and save the farm from going into
strange hands. But it was my good fortune, a kind of constitutional good
luck and not any business talent that enabled me to do so. Remembering
the prediction of the old quack phrenologist, I used to have my dreams
when a boy, especially on one occasion, I remember, when I was tending
the sap kettles in the sugar bush on a bright April day, of gaining
great wealth and coming home in imposing style and astonishing the
natives with my display. How different the reality from the boy's dream!
I came back indeed with a couple of thousand dollars in my pocket (on my
bank book), sorrowing and oppressed, more like a pilgrim doing penance
than like a conqueror returning from his victories. But we kept the
old farm, and as you know, it still plays an important part in my life
though I passed the title to my brother many years ago. It is my only
home, other homes that I have had were mere camping places for a day
and night. But the wealth which my bumps indicated turned out to be of
a very shadowy and uncommercial kind, yet of a kind that thieves cannot
steal or panics disturb.
I remember the first day I went to school, probably near my fifth year.
It was at the old stone school house, about one and a half miles from
home. I recall vividly the suit Mother made for the occasion out of some
striped cotton goods with a pair of little flaps or hound's ears upon my
shoulders that tossed about as I ran. I accompanied Olly Ann, my oldest
sister. At each one of the four houses we passed on the way I asked,
"Who lives there?" I have no recollection of what happened at school
those first days, but I remember struggling with the alphabet soon
thereafter; the letters were arranged in a column, the vowels first, a,
e, i, o, u, and then the consonants. The teacher would call us to her
chair three or four times a day, and opening the Cobb's spelling-book,
point to the letters one by one and ask me to name them, drilling them
into me in that way. I remember that one of the boys, older than I, Hen
Meeker, on one occasion stuck on "e." "I'll bet little Johnny Burris can
tell what that letter is. Come up here, Johnny." Up I went and promptly
answered, to the humiliation of Hen, "e." "I told you so," said the
school marm. How long it took me to learn the alphabet in this arbitrary
manner I do not know. But I remember tackling the a, b, abs, and slowly
mastering those short columns. I remember also getting down under the
desk and tickling the bare ankles of the big girls that sat in the seat
in front of me.
The summer days were long and little boys must sit on the hard seats and
be quiet and go out only at the regular recess. The seat I sat on was a
slab turned flat side up and supported on four legs cut from a sapling.
My feet did not touch the floor and I suppose I got very tired.
One afternoon the oblivion of sleep came over me and when I came to
consciousness again I was in a neighbour's house on a couch and the
"smell of camphor pervaded the room." I had fallen off the seat backward
and hit my head on the protruding stones of the unplastered wall behind
me and cut a hole in it, and I suppose for the moment effectively
scattered my childish wits. But Mrs. Reed was a motherly body and
consoled me with flowers and sweets and bathed my wounds with camphor
and I suppose little Johnny was soon himself again. I have often
wondered if a small bony protuberance on the back of my head dated from
that collision with the old stone school house.
Another early remembrance connected with the old stone school house is
that of seeing Hiram, during the summer noons, catch fish in a pail back
of old Jonas More's grist mill and put them in the pot holes in the red
sandstone rocks, to be kept there till we went home at night. Then
he took them in his dinner pail and put them in his pond down in the
pasture lot. I suspect that it was this way that chubs were introduced
into the West Settlement trout stream. The fish used to swim around and
around in the pot holes seeking a way to escape. I would put my finger
into the water but jerk it back quickly as the fish came around. I was
afraid of them. But before that I was once scared into a panic by a
high-soaring hen hawk. I have probably pointed out to you where, one
summer day, as I was going along the road out on what we called the
big hill, I looked skyward and saw a big hen hawk describing his large
circles about me. A sudden fear fell upon me, and I took refuge behind
the stone wall. Still earlier in my career I had my first panic farther
along on this same road. I suppose I had started off on my first journey
to explore the world when, getting well down the Deacon road beside the
woods, I looked back and, seeing how far I was from home, was seized
with a sudden consternation and turned and ran back as fast as I could
go. I have seen a young robin do the same thing when it had wandered out
a yard or so on the branch away from its nest.
I mastered only my a-b-c's at the old stone school house. A year or two
later we were sent off in the West Settlement district and I went to
school at a little unpainted school house with a creek on one side of it
and toeing squarely on the highway on the other. This also was about one
and a half miles from home, an easy, adventurous journey in the summer
with the many allurements of fields, stream, and wood, but in winter
often a battle with snow and cold. In winter we went across lots, my
elder brothers breaking a path through the fields and woods. How the
tracks in the snow--squirrels, hares, skunks, foxes--used to excite my
curiosity! And the line of ledges off on the left in the woods where
brother Wilson used to set traps for skunks and coons--how they haunted
my imagination as I caught dim glimpses of them, trudging along in our
narrow path! One mild winter morning, after I had grown to be a boy of
twelve or thirteen, my younger brother and I had an adventure with a
hare. He sat in his form in the deep snow between the roots of a maple
tree that stood beside the path. We were almost upon him before we
discovered him. As he did not move I withdrew a few yards to a stone
wall and armed myself with a boulder the size of my fist. Returning, I
let drive, sure of my game, but I missed by a foot, and the hare bounded
away over the wall and out into the open and off for the hemlocks a
quarter of a mile away. A rabbit in his form only ten feet away does not
so easily become a rabbit in the hand. This desire of the farm boy to
slay every wild creature he saw was universal in my time. I trust things
have changed in this respect since then.
At the little old school house I had many teachers, Bill Bouton, Bill
Allaben, Taylor Grant, Jason Powell, Rossetti Cole, Rebecca Scudder,
and others. I got well into Dayball's Arithmetic, Olney's Geography,
and read Hall's History of the United States--through the latter
getting quite familiar with the Indian wars and the French war and the
Revolution. Some books in the district library also attracted me. I
think I was the only one of the family that took books from the library.
I recall especially "Murphy, the Indian Killer" and the "Life of
Washington." The latter took hold of me; I remember one summer Sunday,
as I was playing through the house with my older brothers, of stopping
to read a certain passage of it aloud, and that it moved me so that I
did not know whether I was in the body or out. Many times I read
that passage and every time I was submerged, as it were, by a wave of
emotion. I mention so trifling a matter only to show how responsive
I was to literature at an early age. I should perhaps offset this
statement by certain other facts which are by no means so flattering.
There was a period in my latter boyhood when comic song-books, mostly of
the Negro minstrely sort, satisfied my craving for poetic literature.
I used to learn the songs by heart and invent and extemporize tunes for
them. To this day I can repeat some of those rank Negro songs.
My taste for books began early, but my taste for good literature was
of a much later and of slow growth. My interest in theological and
scientific questions antedated my love of literature. During the last
half of my 'teens I was greatly interested in phrenology and possessed a
copy of Spurzheim's "Phrenology," and of Comb's "Constitution of Man."
I also subscribed to Fowler's _Phrenological Journal_ and for years
accepted the phrenologists' own estimate of the value of their science.
And I still see some general truths in it. The size and shape of the
brain certainly give clues to the mind within, but its subdivision into
many bumps, or numerous small areas, like a garden plot, from each
one of which a different crop is produced, is absurd. Certain bodily
functions are localized in the brain, but not our mental and emotional
traits--veneration, self-esteem, sublimity--these are attributes of the
mind as a unit.
As I write these lines I am trying to see wherein I differed from my
brothers and from other boys of my acquaintance. I certainly had a
livelier interest in things and events about me. When Mr. McLaurie
proposed to start an academy in the village and came there to feel the
pulse of the people and to speak upon the subject I believe I was the
only boy in his audience. I was probably ten or twelve years of age.
At one point in his address the speaker had occasion to use me to
illustrate his point: "About the size of that boy there," he said,
pointing to me, and my face flushed with embarrassment. The academy
was started and I hoped in a few years to attend it. But the time when
Father could see his way to send me there never came. One season when
I was fifteen or sixteen, I set my heart on going to school at
Harpersfield. A boy whom I knew in the village attended it and I wanted
to accompany him. Father talked encouragingly and held it out as a
possible reward if I helped hurry the farm work along. This I did, and
for the first time taking to field with the team and plough and "summer
fallowing" one of the oat-stubble lots. I followed the plough those
September days with dreams of Harpersfield Academy hovering about me,
but the reality never came. Father concluded, after I had finished my
job of ploughing, that he could not afford it. Butter was low and he had
too many other ways for using his money. I think it quite possible that
my dreams gave me the best there was in Harpersfield anyway--a worthy
aspiration is never lost. All these things differentiate me from my
brothers.
My interest in theological questions showed itself about the same time.
An itinerant lecturer with a smooth, ready tongue came to the village
charged with novel ideas about the immortality of the soul, accepting
the literal truth of the text "The soul that sinneth, it shall die."
I attended the meetings and took notes of the speaker's glib talk. I
distinctly remember that it was from his mouth that I first heard the
word "encyclopaedia." When he cited the "Encyclopaedia Britannica"
in confirmation of some statement, I had no doubt of its truth, and I
resolved sometime to get my hands on that book. I still have those notes
and references that I took sixty years ago.
At a much earlier stage of my mental development I had a passion for
drawing, but, quite unguided, it resulted only in a waste of paper. I
wanted to walk before I could creep, to paint before I could draw,
and getting a box of cheap water colours, I indulged my crude artistic
instincts. My most ambitious piece was a picture of General Winfield
Scott standing beside his horse and some piece of artillery, which I
copied from a print. It was of course an awful daub, but in connection
with it I heard for the first time a new word,--the word "taste" used
in its aesthetic sense. One of the neighbour women was calling at the
house, and seeing my picture said to Mother, "What taste that boy has."
That application of the word made an impression on me that I have never
forgotten.
About this time I heard another new word. We were working on the road,
and I with my hoe was working beside an old Quaker farmer, David Corbin,
who used to be a school teacher. A large flat stone was turned over, and
beneath it in some orderly arrangement were some smaller stones. "Here
are some antiquities," said Mr. Corbin, and my vocabulary received
another addition. A new word or a new thing was very apt to make its
mark upon my mind. I have told elsewhere what a revelation to me was
my first glimpse of one of the warblers, the black-throated blue-back,
indicating as it did a world of bird life of which I had never dreamed,
the bird life in the inner heart of the woods. My brothers and other
boys were with me but they did not see the new bird. The first time
I saw the veery, or Wilson's thrush, also stands out in my memory.
It alighted in the road before us on the edge of the woods. "A brown
thrasher," said Bill Chase. It was not the thrasher but it was a
new bird to me and the picture of it is in my mind as if made only
yesterday. Natural History was a subject unknown to me in my boyhood,
and such a thing as nature study in the schools was of course unheard
of. Our natural history we got unconsciously in the sport at noon time,
or on our way to and from school or in our Sunday excursions to
the streams and woods. We learned much about the ways of foxes and
woodchucks and coons and skunks and squirrels by hunting them. The
partridge, too, and the crows, hawks, and owls, and the song birds
of the field and orchard, all enter into the farm boy's life. I early
became familiar with the songs and habits of all the common birds, and
with field mice and the frogs, toads, lizards, and snakes. Also with the
wild bees and wasps. One season I made a collection of bumblebee honey,
studying the habits of five or six different kinds and rifling their
nests. I kept my store of bumble-bee honey in the attic where I had a
small box full of the comb and a large phial filled with the honey. How
well I came to know the different dispositions of the various kinds--the
small red-vested that made its nest in a hole in the ground; the
small black-vested, the large black-vested, the yellow-necked, the
black-banded, etc., that made their nests in old mice nests in the
meadow or in the barn and other places. I used to watch and woo the
little piping frogs in the spring marshes when I had driven the cows to
pasture at night, till they would sit in my open hand and pipe. I used
to creep on my hands and knees through the woods to see the partridge in
the act of drumming. I used to watch the mud wasps building their nests
in the old attic and noted their complaining cry while in the act of
pressing on the mud. I noted the same complaining cry from the bees when
working on the flower of the purple-flowering raspberry, what we called
"Scotch caps." I tried to trap foxes and soon learned how far the fox's
cunning surpassed mine. My first lesson in animal psychology I got from
old Nat Higby as he came riding by on horseback one winter day, his huge
feet almost meeting under the horse, just as a hound was running a
fox across our upper mountain lot. "My boy," he said, "that fox may be
running as fast as he can, but if you stood behind that big rock beside
his course, and as he came along should jump out and shout 'hello,' he
would run faster." That was the winter when in fond imagination I saw a
stream of silver dollars coming my way from the red foxes I was planning
to deprive of their pelts when they needed them most. I have told
elsewhere of my trapping experiences and how completely I failed.
I was born at Roxbury, N. Y., April 3, 1837. At least two other American
authors of note were born on the third of April--Washington Irving and
Edward Everett Hale. The latter once wrote me a birthday letter in which
he said, among other things, "I have been looking back over my diaries
to see what I was doing the day you were being born. I find I was
undergoing an examination in logic at Harvard College." The only other
American author born in 1837 is William Dean Howells, who was born in
Ohio in March of that year.
I was the son of a farmer, who was the son of a farmer, who was again
the son of a farmer. There are no professional or commercial men in my
line for several generations, my blood has the flavour of the soil in
it; it is rural to the last drop. I can find no city dwellers in the
line of my descent in this country. The Burroughs tribe, as far back as
I can find any account of them, were mainly countrymen and tillers of
the soil. The Rev. George Burroughs, who was hung as a witch at Salem,
Mass., in 1694, may have been of the family, though I can find no proof
of it. I wanted to believe that he was and in 1898 I made a visit to
Salem and to Gallows Hill to see the spot where he, the last victim
of the witchcraft craze, ended his life. There is no doubt that the
renegade preacher, Stephen Burroughs, who stole a lot of his father's
sermons and set up as a preacher and forger on his own account about
1720, was a third or fourth cousin of my father's.
Farmers with a decidedly religious bent contributed the main elements
of my personality. I was a countryman dyed in the wool, yea, more than
that, born and bred in the bone, and my character is fundamentally
reverent and religious. The religion of my fathers underwent in me
a kind of metamorphosis and became something which would indeed have
appeared like rank atheism to them, but which was nevertheless full
of the very essence of true religion--love, reverence, wonder,
unworldliness, and devotion to ideal truth--but in no way identified
with Church or creed.
I used to feel that my religious temperament was as clearly traceable
to the hard Calvinism of my fathers, as the stratified sandstone is
traceable to the old granite rock, but that it had undergone a sea
change as had the sandstone, or in my case a science change through the
activity of the mind and of the age in which I lived. It was rationalism
touched with mysticism and warm with poetic emotion.
My paternal grandfather and great-grandfather came from near Bridgeport
in Connecticut about the end of the Revolution and settled in Stamford,
Delaware County, New York. Captain Stephen Burroughs of Bridgeport, a
mathematician and a man of note in his time, was Father's great uncle.
Father used to say that his uncle Stephen could build a ship and sail
it around the world. The family name is still common in and about
Bridgeport. The first John Burroughs of whom I can find any record came
to this country from the West Indies and settled in Stratford, Conn.,
about 1690. He had ten children, and ten children to a family was the
rule down to my own father. One October while on a cruise with a small
motor boat on Long Island Sound, stress of weather compelled us to seek
shelter in Black Rock harbour, which is a part of Bridgeport. In the
morning we went ashore, and as we were walking up a street seeking the
trolley line to take us into the city, we saw a large brick building
with the legend on it--"The Burroughs Home." I felt like going in and
claiming its hospitality--after our rough experience on the Sound its
look and its name were especially inviting. Some descendant of Captain
Stephen Burroughs was probably its founder.
My great-grandfather, Ephraim, I believe, died in 1818, and was
buried in the town of Stamford in a field that is now cultivated. My
grandfather, Eden Burroughs, died in Roxbury in 1842, aged 72, and my
father, Chauncey A. Burroughs, in 1884 at the age of 81.
My maternal grandfather, Edmund Kelly, was Irish, though born in this
country about 1765. It is from his Irish strain that I get many of my
Celtic characteristics--my decidedly feminine temperament. I always felt
that I was more a Kelly than a Burroughs. Grandfather Kelly was a
small man, with a big head and marked Irish features. He entered the
Continental army when a mere lad in some menial capacity, but before the
end he carried a musket in the ranks. He was with Washington at Valley
Forge and had many stories to tell of their hardships. He was upward of
seventy-five years old when I first remember him--a little man in a blue
coat with brass buttons. He and Granny used to come to our house once or
twice a year for a week or two at a time. Their permanent home was with
Uncle Martin Kelly in Red Kill, eight miles away. I remember him as a
great angler. How many times in the May or June mornings, as soon as he
had had his breakfast, have I seen him digging worms and getting ready
to go a-fishing up Montgomery Hollow or over in Meeker's Hollow, or over
in West Settlement! You could always be sure he would bring home a nice
string of trout. Occasionally I was permitted to go with him. How nimbly
he would walk, even when he was over eighty, and how skilfully he would
take the trout! I was an angler myself before I was ten, but Grandfather
would take trout from places in the stream where I would not think it
worth while to cast my hook. But I never fished when I went with him,
I carried the fish and watched him. The pull home, often two or three
miles, tried my young legs, but Grandfather would show very little
fatigue, and I know he did not have the ravenous hunger I always had
when I went fishing, so much so that I used to think there was in this
respect something peculiar about going fishing. One hour along the trout
streams would develop more hunger in me than half a day hoeing corn or
working on the road--a peculiarly fierce, all-absorbing desire for food,
so that a piece of rye bread and butter was the most delicious thing in
the world. I remember that one June day my cousin and I, when we were
about seven or eight years old, set out for Meeker's Hollow for trout.
It was a pull of over two miles and over a pretty hard hill. Our courage
held out until we reached the creek, but we were too hungry to fish; we
turned homeward and fed upon the wild strawberries in the pastures and
meadows we passed through and they kept us alive until we reached
home. Oh, that youthful hunger beside the trout stream, was there ever
anything else like it in the world!
Grandfather Kelly was a fisherman nearly up to the year of his death at
the age of eighty-eight. He had few of the world's goods and he did
not want them. His only vice was plug tobacco, his only recreation was
angling, and his only reading the Bible. How long and attentively would
he pore over the Book!--but I never heard him comment upon it or
express any religious opinion or conviction. He believed in witches and
hobgoblins: he had seen them and experienced them and used to tell us
stories that almost made us afraid of our own shadows. My own youthful
horror of darkness, and of dark rooms and recesses and cellars even in
the daytime, was due no doubt largely to Grandfather's blood-curdling
tales. Yet I may be wrong about this, for I remember a fearful
experience I had when I was a child of three or four years. I see myself
with some of the other children cowering in a corner of the old kitchen
at night with my eyes fixed on the black space of the open door of the
bedroom occupied by my father and mother. They were out for the evening
and we were waiting for their return. The agony of that waiting I shall
never forget. Whether or not the other children shared my fear I do not
remember; probably they did, and maybe communicated their fear to me. I
could not take my eyes off the entrance to that black cavern, though of
what I may have fancied it held that would hurt me I have no idea.
It was only the child's inherited fear of the dark, the unknown, the
mysterious. Grandfather's stories, no doubt, strengthened that fear. It
clung to me all through my boyhood and until my fifteenth or sixteenth
year and was peculiarly acute about my twelfth and thirteenth years.
The road through the woods at twilight, the barn, the wagon house, the
cellar set my imagination on tiptoe. If I had to pass the burying ground
up on the hill by the roadside in the dark, I did so very gingerly. I
was too scared to run for fear the ghosts of all the dead buried there
would be at my heels.
Probably I get my love for the contemplative life and for nature
more through my mother than through my father; Mother had the
self-consciousness of the Celt, Father not at all, though he had the
Celtic temperament: red hair and freckles! The red-haired, freckled,
harsh-voiced little man made a great deal of noise about the
farm--shouting at the stock, sending the dog after the cows or after the
pigs in the garden, or calling his orders to us in the field or shouting
back his directions for the work after he had started for the Beaver
Dam village. But his bark was always more to be feared than his bite. He
would threaten loudly but punish mildly or not at all. But he improved
the fields, he cleared the woods, he battled with the rocks and the
stones, he paid his debts and he kept his faith. He was not a man of
sentiment, though he was a man of feeling. He was easily moved to tears
and had strong religious convictions and emotions. These emotions often
found vent in his reading his hymn book aloud in a curious undulating
sing-song tone. He knew nothing of what we call love of nature and he
owed little or nothing to books after his schoolboy days. He usually
took two weekly publications--an Albany or a New York newspaper and a
religious paper called _The Signs of the Times_, the organ of the Old
School Baptist Church, of which he was a member. He never asked me about
my own books and I doubt that he ever looked into one of them. How far
the current of my thoughts and interests ran from the current of his
thoughts and interests! Literature he had never heard of, science
and philosophy were an unknown world to him. Religion (hard
predestinarianism), politics (democratic), and farming took up all his
thoughts and time. He had no desire to travel, he was not a hunter or
fisherman, and the shows and vanities of the world disturbed him not.
When I grew to crave schooling and books he was disturbed lest I become
a Methodist minister--his special aversion. Religion on such easy and
wholesale terms as that of his Methodist neighbours made his nostrils
dilate with contempt. But literature was an enemy he had never heard of.
A writer of books had no place in his category of human occupations;
and as for a poet, he would probably have ranked him with the dancing
master. Yet late in life, when he saw my picture in a magazine, he
is said to have shed tears. Poor Father, his heart was tender, but
concerning so much that fills and moves the world, his mind was dark.
He was a good farmer, a helpful neighbour, a devoted parent and husband,
and he did well the work in the world which fell to his lot to do. The
narrowness and bigotry of his class and church and time were his, but
probity of character, ready good will, and a fervent religious nature
were his also. His heart was much softer than his creed. He might scoff
at his neighbour's religion or politics, but he was ever ready to lend
him a hand.
The earliest memory I can recall of him dates back to a spring day in
my early childhood. The "hired girl" had thrown my straw hat off the
stonework into the road. In my grief and helplessness to punish her as
I thought she merited, I looked up to the side hill above the house and
saw Father striding across the ploughed ground with a bag strung across
his breast from which he was sowing grain. His measured strides, the
white bag, and his regular swinging arm made a picture on the background
of the red soil, all heightened no doubt by my excited state of mind,
that stamped itself indelibly upon my memory. He strode across those
hills with that bag suspended around his neck, sowing grain, for many
years.
Another spring picture of him much later in life, when I was a man grown
and home on a visit, comes to mind. I see him following a team of horses
hitched to a harrow across a ploughed field, dragging in the oats. To
and fro he goes all afternoon, the dust streaming behind him and the
ground smoothing as his work progressed I suppose I had a feeling that
I should have taken his place. He always got his crops in in season and
gathered in season. His farm was his kingdom and he wanted no other. I
can see him going about it, calling the dog, "hollering" at the cattle
or the sheep or at the men at work in the fields, making a great deal of
unnecessary noise, but always with an eye to his crops and to the best
interests of the farm. He was a home body, had no desire to travel,
little curiosity about other lands, except, maybe, Bible lands, and felt
an honest contempt for city ways and city people. He was as unaffected
as a child and would ask a man his politics or a woman her age as soon
as ask them the time of day. He had little delicacy of feeling on the
conventional side but great tenderness of emotion on the purely human
side. His candour was at times appalling, and he often brought a look
of shame into Mother's face. He had received a fairly good schooling for
those times and had been a school teacher himself in the winter months.
Mother was one of his pupils when he taught in Red Kill. I passed the
little school house recently and wondered if there was a counterpart of
Amy Kelly among the few girls I saw standing about the door, or if there
was a red-haired, freckled, country greenhorn at the teacher's desk
inside. Father was but once in New York, sometime in the '20's, and
never saw the capitol of his country or his state. And I am sure he
never sat on a jury or had a lawsuit in my time. He took an interest in
politics and was always a Democrat, and during the Civil War, I fear, a
"copperhead." His religion saw no evil in slavery. I remember seeing him
in some political procession during the Harrison Campaign of 1840. He
was with a gang of men standing up in a wagon from the midst of which
rose a pole with a coon skin or a stuffed coon upon it. I suppose what I
saw was part of a Harrison political procession.
Father "experienced religion" in his early manhood and became a member
of the Old School Baptist Church. To become members of that church
it was not enough that you wanted to lead a better life and serve God
faithfully; you must have had a certain religious experience, have gone
through a crisis as Paul did, been convicted of sin in some striking
manner, and have descended into the depths of humiliation and despair,
and then, when all seemed lost, have heard the voice of forgiveness
and acceptance and felt indeed that you were now a child of God. This
crucial experience the candidate for church membership was called on to
relate before the elders of the church, and if the story rang true,
he or she was in due time enrolled in the company of the elect few. No
doubt about its being a real experience with most of those people--a
storm-and-stress period that lasted for weeks or months before the joy
of peace and forgiveness came to their souls. I have heard some of those
experiences and have read the record of many more in _The Signs of the
Times_, which Father took for more than fifty years. The conversion was
radical and lasting, these men led changed lives ever after. With
them once a child of God, always a child of God, reformation never
miscarried. It was an iron-clad faith and it stood the wear and tear of
life well. Father was not ostentatiously religious. Far from it. I have
known him to draw in hay on Sunday when a shower threatened, and once
I saw him carry a gun when the pigeons were about; but he came back
gameless with a guilty look when he saw me, and I think he never wavered
in his Old School Baptist faith. There were no religious observances in
the family and no religious instruction. Father read his hymn book and
his Bible and at times his _Signs_, but never compelled us to read them.
His church did not believe in Sunday-schools or in any sort of religious
training. Their preachers never prepared their sermons but spoke
the words that the Spirit put into their mouths. As they were mostly
unlettered men the Spirit had many sins of rhetoric and logic to answer
for. Their discourses did more credit to their hearts than to their
heads. I recall some of their preachers, or Elders, as they were called,
very distinctly--Elder Jim Mead, Elder Morrison, Elder Hewett, Elder
Fuller, Elder Hubble--all farmers and unlearned in the lore of this
world, but earnest men and some of them strong, picturesque characters.
Elder Jim Mead usually went barefooted during the summer, and Mother
once told me that he often preached barefooted in the school house.
Elder Hewett was their strong man during my youth--a narrow and darkened
mind tried by the wisdom of the schools, but a man of native force of
character and often in his preaching attaining to a strain of true and
lofty eloquence. His discourses, if their jumble of Scriptural texts may
be called such, were never a call to sinners to repent and be saved--God
would attend to that Himself--but a vehement justification from the
Scriptures of the Old School Baptist creed, or the doctrine of election
and justification by faith, not by works. The Methodists or Arminians,
as he called them, were a thorn in his side and he never tired of
hurling his Pauline texts at their cheap and easy terms of salvation.
Could he have been convinced that he must share Heaven with the
Arminians, I believe he would have preferred to take his chance in the
other place. Religious intolerance is an ugly thing, but its days in
this world are numbered, and the day of the Old School Baptist Society
seems numbered. Their church, which was often crowded in my youth, is
almost deserted now. This generation is too light and frivolous for such
a heroic creed: the sons of the old members are not men enough to stand
up under the moral weight of Calvinism and predestination. Absurd as the
doctrine seems to us, it went with or begot something in those men and
women of an earlier time--a moral fibre and depth of character--to which
the later generations are strangers. Of course those men were nearer the
stump than we are and had more of the pioneer virtues and hardiness than
we have, and struggles and victory or defeat were more a part of their
lives than they are of ours, a hard creed with heroic terms of salvation
fitted their moods better than it fits ours.
My youthful faith in a jealous and vengeful God, which in some way had
been instilled into my mind, was rudely shaken one summer day during a
thunderstorm. The idea had somehow got into my head that if in any
way we mocked the powers up above or became disrespectful toward them,
vengeance would follow, quick and sure. At a loud peal overhead the boy
I was playing with deliberately stuck up his scornful lips at the clouds
and in other ways expressed his defiance. I fairly cringed in my tracks;
I expected to see my companion smitten with a thunderbolt at my side.
That I recall the incident so vividly shows what a deep impression it
made upon me. But I have long ceased to think that the Ruler of the
storms sees or cares whether we make faces at the clouds or not--do your
work well and make all the wry faces you please.
My native mountain, out of whose loins I sprang, is called the Old
Clump. It sits there with bare head but mantled sides, looking southward
and holding the home farm of three hundred and fifty acres in its
lap. The farm with its checkered fields lies there like a huge apron,
reaching up over the smooth sloping thighs on the west and on the east
and coming well up on the breast, forming the big rough mountain fields
where the sheep and young cattle graze. Those mountain pastures rarely
knew the plough, but the broad side-hill fields, four of them, that
cover the inside of the western thigh, have been alternately ploughed
and grazed since my boyhood and before. They yield good crops of rye,
oats, buckwheat, and potatoes, and fair summer grazing. In winter huge
snow banks lie there just below the summit of the hill, blotting out the
stone fences beneath eight or ten feet of snow. I have known these banks
to linger there until the middle of May. I remember carrying a jug of
water one hot May day to my brother Curtis who was ploughing the upper
and steepest side hill, and whose plough had nearly reached the edge of
the huge snow bank. Sometimes the woodchucks feel the call of spring in
their dens in the ground beneath them and dig their way out through
the coarse, granulated snow, leaving muddy tracks where they go. I have
"carried together" both oats and rye in all these fields. One September,
during the first year of the Civil War, 1862, we were working in the
oats there and Hiram was talking hourly of enlisting in the army as a
drummer boy. When the cattle are grazing there, one may often see
them from the road over the eastern leg of Old Clump which is lower,
silhouetted against the evening sky. The bleating of the sheep in the
still summer twilight on the bosom of Old Clump is also a sweet memory.
So is the evening song of the vesper sparrow, which one may hear all
summer long floating out from these sweet pastoral solitudes. From one
of these side-hill fields, Father and his hired man, Rube Dart, were
once drawing oats on a sled when the load capsized while Rube had his
fork in it on the upper side trying to hold it down, and the fork with
Rube clinging to it described a complete circle in the air, Rube landing
on his feet below, none the worse for his adventure.
Grandfather's farm, which he and Grandmother carved out of the
wilderness in the last years of 1700 and where Father was born in 1802,
lies just over the hill on the western knee of Old Clump, and is in the
watershed of West Settlement, a much broader and deeper valley of nearly
a dozen farms, and to which my home valley is a tributary. The sugar
bush lies near the groin of the old mountain, the "beech woods" over the
eastern knee, and the Rundle Place, where now is Woodchuck Lodge, is on
his skirts that look eastward. Hence, most of the home farm stands apart
in a valley by itself. As you approach on the train from the south
you may see Old Clump rising up in the north eight or ten miles away,
presenting the appearance of a well-defined cone, with the upper portion
of the farm showing, and hiding behind it the mountain system of which
it is the southern end.
Old Clump figured a good deal in my boyhood life and scarcely less in my
life since. The first deer's horn I ever saw we found there one Sunday
under a jutting rock as we were on our way to the summit. My excursions
to salt and count the sheep often took me there, and my boyhood thirst
for the wild and adventurous took me there still oftener. Old Clump used
to lift me up into the air three thousand feet and introduce me to his
great brotherhood of mountains far and near, and make me acquainted with
the full-chested exhilaration that awaits one on mountain tops. Graham,
Double Top, Slide Mountain, Peek o' Moose, Table Mountain, Wittenburg,
Cornell, and others are visible from the summit. There was as well
something so gentle and sweet and primitive about its natural clearings
and open glades, about the spring that bubbled up from under a tilted
rock just below the summit, about the grassy terraces, its hidden
ledges, its scattered, low-branching, moss-covered maples, the
cloistered character of its clumps of small beeches, its domestic
looking mountain ash, its orchard-like wild black cherries, its
garden-like plots of huckleberries, raspberries, and strawberries, the
patches of fragrant brakes like dense miniature forests through which
one wades as through patches of green midsummer snow, its divine strains
of the hermit thrush floating out of the wooded depths below you--all
these things drew me as a boy and still draw me as an old man.
From where the road crosses the eastern knee of Old Clump to where it
crosses the western knee is over half a mile. Well down in the valley
between them the home buildings are situated, and below them the old and
very productive meadows, only the upper borders of which have ever known
the plough. The little brooklet that drains the valley used to abound in
trout, but in sixty years it has dwindled to such an extent and has been
so nearly obliterated by grazing cattle that there are no trout until
you reach the hemlocks on the threshold of which my fishing excursions
of boyhood used to end. The woods were too dark and mysterious for
my inflamed imagination--inflamed, I suppose, by Grandfather's spook
stories. In this little stream in the pasture I used to build ponds, the
ruins of one of which are still visible. In this pond I learned to swim,
but none of my brothers would venture in with me. I was the only one in
the family who ever mastered the art of swimming and I mastered it by
persistent paddling in this pond on Sundays and summer evenings and
between my farm duties at other times. All my people were "landlubbers"
of the most pronounced type and afraid to get above their knees in the
water or to trust themselves to row-boats or other craft. Here again I
was an odd one.
I used to make kites and crossbows and darts and puzzle people with
the trick of the buncombe blocks. One summer I made a very large kite,
larger than any I had ever seen, and attaching a string fully half a
mile long sent it up with a meadow mouse tethered to the middle of the
frame. I suppose I wanted to give this little creature of the dark and
hidden ways of the meadow--so scared of its life from hawks, foxes,
and cats, that it rarely shows itself out of its secret tunnels in the
meadow bottoms or its retreats under the flat stones in the pastures--a
taste of sky and sunshine and a glimpse of the big world in which it
lived. He came down winking and blinking but he appeared none the worse
for his trip skyward, and I let him go to relate his wonderful adventure
to his fellows.
Once I made a miniature sawmill by the roadside on the overflow of water
from the house spring that used to cause people passing by to stop and
laugh. It had a dam, a flume, an overshot wheel ten inches in diameter,
a carriage for the log (a green cucumber), a gate for the tin saw about
six inches long, and a superstructure less than two feet high. The water
reached the wheel through a piece of old pump log three or four feet
long, capped with the body of an old tin dinner horn. Set at quite an
angle, the water issued from the half-inch opening in the end of the
horn with force enough to make the little wheel hum and send the saw
through the cucumber at a rapid rate--only I had to shove the carriage
along by hand. Brother Hiram helped me with the installation of this
plant. It was my plaything for only one season.
I made a cross-gun that had a barrel (in the end of which you dropped
the arrow) and a lock with a trigger, and that was really a spiteful,
dangerous weapon. About my fifteenth year I had a real gun, a small,
double-barrelled gun made by some ingenious blacksmith, I fancy. But it
had fairly good shooting qualities--several times I brought down wild
pigeons from the tree tops with it. Rabbits, gray squirrels, partridges,
also fell before it. I bought it of a pedlar for three dollars, paying
on the instalment plan, with money made out of maple sugar.
On the wooded west side of Old Clump we used to hunt rabbits--really the
northern hare, brown in summer and white in winter. Their runways made
paths among the mountain-maple bushes just below the summit. On the
eastern side was a more likely place for gray squirrels, coons,
and partridges. Foxes were at home on all sides and Old Clump was a
favourite ground of the fox hunters. One day of early Indian summer,
as we were digging potatoes on the lower side hill, our attention was
attracted by someone calling from the edge of the woods at the upper
side of the sheep lot. My brothers rested on their hoe handles a moment
and I brushed the soil from my hands and straightened up from my
bent attitude of picking up the potatoes. We all listened and looked.
Presently we made out the figure of a man up by the edge of the woods
and soon decided from his excited voice and gestures that he was calling
for help. Finally, we made out that someone was hurt and the oxen and
sled were needed to bring him down. It turned out to be a neighbour,
Gould Bouton, calling, and Elihu Meeker, his uncle, who was hurt. They
were fox hunting and Elihu had fired at the fox from the top of a high
rock near the top of Old Clump and in his excitement had in some way
slipped from the rock and fallen on the stones fifteen or twenty feet
below and sustained serious injury to his side and back. With all
possible speed the oxen and sled were got up there and after long
waiting they returned to the house with Elihu aboard, groaning and
writhing on a heap of straw. The injury had caused him to bleed from his
kidneys. In the meantime Doctor Newkirk had been sent for and I remember
that I feared Elihu would die before he got there. What a relief I
felt when I saw the doctor coming on horseback, in the good old style,
running his horse at the top of his speed! "Now," I said, "Elihu will
be saved." He had already lost a good deal of blood, but the first
thing the doctor did was to take more from him. This was in times when
bleeding was about the first thing a doctor did on all occasions. The
idea seemed to be that you could sap the strength of the disease by
that means without sapping the strength of the man. Well, the old hunter
survived the double blood-letting; he was cured of his injury and cured
of his fox-hunting fever also.
He was a faithful, hard-working man, a carpenter by trade. He built our
"new barn" in 1844 and put a new roof on the old barn. Father got out
the timber for the new barn in old Jonas More's hemlocks and hauled it
to the sawmill. Lanson Davids worked with him. They had their dinner in
the winter woods. One day they had a pork stew and Father said he had
never eaten anything in his life that tasted so good. He and Mother were
then in the flower of their days and Lanson Davids said to him on this
occasion: "Chauncey, you are the biggest hog to eat I ever saw in my
life." "I was hungry," said Father.
We had "raisings" in those days, when a new building was put up. The
timbers were heavy, often hewn from trees in the woods, set up, pinned
together in what were called "bents." In a farmer's barn there were
usually four bents, tied together by the "plates" and cross beams. I
remember well the early summer day when the new barn was raised. I can
see Elihu guiding the corner post of the first bent and when the men
were ready calling out: "All together now," "set her up," "heave 'o
heave, heave 'o heave," till the bent was in position.
One June when he was shingling the old barn he engaged me to pick him
some wild strawberries. When I came in the afternoon with my four-quart
pail nearly full he came down off the roof and gave me a silver quarter,
or two shillings, as then called, and I felt very rich.
It is an open country, like an unrolled map, simple in all its lines,
with little variety in its scenery, devoid of sharp contrasts and sudden
changes and hence lacking in the element of the picturesque which comes
from these things. It is a part of the earth's surface that has never
been subject to convulsion and upheaval. The stratified rock lies
horizontally just as it was laid down in the bottom of the Devonian Seas
millions of years ago. The mountains and the valleys are the result of
vast ages of gentle erosion, and gentleness and repose are stamped
upon every feature of the landscape. The hand of time and the slow but
enormous pressure of the great continental ice sheet have rubbed down
and smoothed off all sharp angles, giving to the mountains their long
sweeping lines, to the hills their broad round backs, and to the valleys
their deep, smooth, trough-like contours. The level strata crop out
here and there, giving to the hills the effect of heavy eyebrows. But
occasionally it is more than that: in the mountains it is often like
a cavernous mouth into which one can retreat several yards, where the
imaginative farm boy loves to prowl and linger like the half savage that
he is and dream of Indians and the wild, adventurous life. There were
a few such cavernous ledges in the woods on my father's farm where one
could retreat from a sudden shower, but less than a mile away there were
two lines of them, one on Pine Hill and one on Chase's Hill, where the
foundations of the earth were laid open, presenting a broken and jagged
rocky front from ten to thirty or forty feet high, gnawed full of little
niches and pockets and cavernous recesses by the never-dulled tooth of
geologic time and affording dens and retreats where Indians and wild
beasts often took refuge. As a boy how I used to haunt these places,
especially on Sunday when young winter-green and black birch gave us an
excuse to go to the woods. What an eternity of time was written in
the faces of those rocks! What world-old forces had left their marks
there!--in the lines, in the colours, in the huge dislocations and
look of impending downfall of many of them, yet with a look of calm
and unconquerable age that can be felt only in the presence of such
survivals of the primaeval. I want no better pastime now, far from my
boyhood as I am, than to spend part of a summer or autumn day amid these
rocks. One passes from the sunny fields, where the cattle are grazing or
the plough is turning the red furrow, into these gray, time-sculptured,
monumental ruins, where the foundations of the everlasting hills are
crumbling, and yet where the silence and the repose are like that of
sidereal space. How relative everything is! The hills and the mountains
grow old and pass away in geologic time as invariably as the snow bank
in spring, and yet in our little span of life they are the types of the
permanent and unchanging.
The phoebe bird loves to build its mossy nest in these shelving ledges,
and once I found that one of our native mice, maybe the jumping mouse,
had apparently taken a hint from her and built a nest of thistledown
covered with moss on a little shelf three or four feet above the ground.
Coons and woodchucks often have their dens in these ledges, and before
the country was settled no doubt bears did also. In one place, under a
huge ledge that projects twelve or fifteen feet, there is a spring to
which cattle come from the near fields to drink. The old earth builders
used material of very unequal hardness and durability when they built
these hills, their contracts were not well supervised, and the result
has been that the more rapid decay of the softer material has undermined
the harder layers and led to their downfall. Every fifty or a hundred or
two hundred feet in the Catskill formation the old contractors slipped
in a layer of soft, slatey, red sandstone which introduces an element of
weakness and that we everywhere see the effects of. One effect of this
weakness has an element of beauty. I refer to the beautiful waterfalls
that are sparsely scattered over this region, made possible, as nearly
everywhere else, by the harder strata holding out after the softer ones
beneath have eroded away, thus keeping the face of the falls nearly
vertical.
The Catskill region is abundantly supplied with springs that yield the
best water in the world. My father's farm had a spring in nearly every
field, each one with a character of its own. What associations linger
about each one of them! How eagerly we found our way to them in the hot
haying and harvesting days!--the small, cold, never-changing spring in
the barn-hill meadow under the beech tree, upon whose now decayed bowl
half-obliterated initials of farm boys and hired men of thirty, fifty,
and nearly seventy years ago may still be seen; the spring in the old
meadow near the barn where the cattle used to drink in winter and where,
with the haymakers, I used to drink so eagerly in summer; the copious
spring in the bank at the foot of the old orchard which, in the severe
drouths of recent years, holds out when other springs fail; the tiny but
perennial spring issuing from under the huge tilted rock in the sumac
field where the young cattle and the sheep of the mountain pasture drink
and where we have all refreshed ourselves so many times; the spring from
under a rocky eyebrow on the big side hill which is now piped to the
house and which in my boyhood was brought in pine or hemlock "pump
logs," and to which I have been sent so many times to clean the leaves
off the tin strainer--what associations have we all of us with that
spring! For over eighty years it has supplied the family with water, and
not till the severe drouths of later years did it fail.
The old beech tree that stands above it is one of the landmarks of the
farm. Once when a boy I saw a flock of wild pigeons disappear in its
leafy interior, and then saw Abe Meeker, who worked for Father in 1840,
shoot into it from the stone wall, six or seven rods below, and bring
down four birds which he could not see when he fired. Three of them fell
dead and one fell at his feet behind the stone wall. But I need not call
the roll of all the fountains of my youth on the home farm--fountains
of youth indeed! and fountain of grateful memories in my later years. I
never pass any of them now but my footsteps linger by them and I clean
them out if they are clogged and neglected and feel that here is a
friend of other days whose face is as bright and youthful as ever.