Father always took a most lively interest in the few magazine articles I
wrote and though he would never "correct" a MS. he would tell why it was
good or bad, and if it was good it gave him the greatest pleasure. Once
when I wrote an article called "Making Hens Lay" and showed him the
cheque I received for it, he exclaimed, "_That_ is the way to make hens
lay!" Though he often said that if he wrote what the editors wanted him
to write, very soon they would not want what he did write, he replied to
my saying that Verdi's most popular opera was written to order, that a
similar request from an editor gave him a hint from which he wrote
one of his best essays. The controversy which Father started and which
President Roosevelt joined and in which he coined the phrase "nature
fakers" did Father much good in that it quickened his thoughts and
stimulated him in many ways. He received many abusive letters, which
only amused and entertained him, and in all it made a most interesting
episode. In one of his letters from Washington he wrote: "At the
Carnegie dinner I met Thompson Seton. He behaved finely and asked to sit
next me at dinner. He quite won my heart." That was March 31, 1903.
In checking up the statements made by the "nature fakers" Father's own
power of observation was much sharpened and he became more alert. And
receiving pay for articles that he wrote on the subject was an added
source of fun; it was like spoils captured from the enemy. I remember
well one day on the Champlain Canal we stopped at noon and Father said
hilariously: "We'll all go to the hotel for dinner. We won't bother
to cook dinner, we'll let the nature fakers pay for our dinner!" Like
everyone else he had his blind side, things he looked at without seeing,
things that had no interest or message for him. On March 1, 1908, he
wrote: "That slip in the _Outlook_ letter irritates me. But any one
can see it was a slip of the pen--nothing can drift to windward--things
drift to leeward. I see how they are laughing at me in the last number."
One first-hand observation Father made I can never forget. The joke was
entirely on him, but he laughed and saw only the nature facts. In going
up to Maine on a fishing expedition we had to wait for hours in the
woods at a junction. While waiting we went down to a fall, where the
brown waters of a small river poured down over many ledges of sandstone.
In this sandstone were worn many pot-holes, some of them perfect, and of
all sizes. In one about the size of a butter tub was a sucker, a measly
fish about a foot long. Nothing else to do, Father pulled off his coat
and rolled up his sleeves, and getting down on his knees he began to
chase this sucker about the pot-hole to catch him. The sucker went
around and around very deliberately until just the right moment arrived
when, with a sudden burst, he threw at least half the water in the pool
into Father's face. The sucker went down with the miniature flood to a
larger pot-hole below. Father was soaked, choked, strangled, and blinded
with the water, but when he had shaken himself and blown the water from
his mouth and nose and wiped his eyes he said: "Now if that had been a
trout he would have been so rattled that he would have jumped right out
here on the rocks, but you see you can't rattle a sucker!"
There was one subject that Father always took seriously, and that was
the question of his diet. In his youth he had known nothing of proper
diet, and though the wholesome, home-made food on the farm had been
the best possible thing for him, in his early manhood he had been most
intemperate in his eating--"eating a whole pie at one sitting," he said.
He loved to recall that when he had the measles he was ordered by the
doctor to drink nothing, and when his thirst got to an unbearable
point he arose, dressed, climbed out of the bedroom window and got some
lemonade, of which he drank about a quart--"and I got well at once," he
would add with a laugh. I wrote some verses about his eating experiments
and I never knew whether he was amused or hurt. He said rather soberly,
the only mention he ever made of them: "I have a new rule now, so you
can add another verse to your poem."
Mother was taken sick in Georgia, where she and Father were spending the
winter, the winter of 1915-16, and in March, 1917, she died here at West
Park. Father had gone away. Though we all knew she could not recover, we
all thought she would live until he returned, but she did not, and from
Cuba, where the news reached him, he wrote a beautiful tribute. Later,
after his return, we laid her to rest among her family in the little
cemetery in Ton Gore, the town where Father first taught school so
many years ago. One by one he had seen his family go, and many of his
friends. I remember that when I told him of a princess whom Carlyle said
outlived her own generation and the next and into the next, he said,
"How lonely she must have been!" and much of this loneliness came into
his sighs and into his thoughts as he felt himself nearing the grave. As
he sat at his desk in the little study, his feet wrapped in an old coat,
an open fire snapping in the fireplace, his pen turned more and more to
the great question. Even in 1901 he wrote from Roxbury, at the time of
the death of his sister Abigail:
I am much depressed, but must not indulge my grief, our band of brothers
and sisters has not been broken since Wilson died, thirty-seven years
ago. Which of us will go next? In the autumn weather in the autumn of
our days we buried our sister beside her husband.
In the same letter, from his own experience he says:
I can understand your want of sympathy with the new college youth.
You have learned one of the lessons of life, namely, that we cannot go
back--cannot repeat our lives. There is already a gulf between you and
those college days. They are of the past. You cannot put yourself in
the place of the new men. The soul constantly demands new fields, new
experiences.
In 1905 he wrote:
In this mysterious intelligence which rules and pervades nature and
which is focussed and gathered up in the mind of man and becomes
conscious of itself--what becomes of it at death? Does it fall back
again into nature as the wave falls back into the ocean, to be gathered
up and focussed in other minds?
During Mother's last illness she was tenderly cared for by an old friend
of the family, Dr. Clara Barrus, who then took up the burden of caring
for Father, not only safeguarding his health, but helping him in his
literary work as well.
On November 23, 1921, we said good-bye in the station in Poughkeepsie. I
looked forward to seeing him in the spring with so much joy. But he was
very sad, and his hand felt frail in mine. His last letter, written in
a broken, running hand, so different from the swift, virile up-and-down
hand of thirty years ago, came from California, where he was urging me
to join the party.
So characteristic of him and of his love of a dog and all the homely
things is the line "Scratch Jack's back for me." I had written him that
I was anxious to see smoke coming out of his study chimney once more,
and this simple thought gave him much pleasure. But it was not to be.