I seem to have been a healthy, active child, very impressionable, and
with more interests and a keener enjoyment of things than most farm boys
have. I was fond of the girls back as early as I can remember, and had
my sweethearts at a very early age....
I learned my letters at school, when I was five or six, in the
old-fashioned way by being called up to the teacher several times a
day and naming the letters as he pointed at them where they stood in a
perpendicular column in Cobb's Spelling-Book. The vowels and consonants
stood in separate columns, and had to be learned one by one, by
continued repetition. It took me a long time, I remember, to distinguish
_b_ from _d_, and _c_ from _e_. When and how I learned to read I do not
remember. I recall Cobb's Second Reader, and later Olney's Geography,
and then Dayballs Arithmetic.
I went to school summers till I was old enough to help on the farm, say
at the age of eleven or twelve, when my schooling was confined to the
winters.
(Illustration of The Old Schoolhouse, Roxbury, New York. From a
photograph by M.H. Fanning)
As a boy, the only farm work that appealed to me was sugar-making in the
maple woods in spring. This I thoroughly enjoyed. It brought me near to
wild nature and was freer from routine than other farm work. Then I soon
managed to gather a little harvest of my own from the sugar bush. I used
to anticipate the general tapping by a few days or a week, and tap a few
trees on my own account along the sunny border of the Woods, and boil
the sap down on the kitchen stove (to the disgust of the womenfolks),
selling the sugar in the village. I think the first money I ever earned
came to me in this way. My first algebra and first grammar I bought
with some of this precious money. When I appeared in the village with my
basket of small cakes of early sugar, how my customers would hail me and
call after me! No one else made such white sugar, or got it to market so
early. One season, I remember, I got twelve silver quarters for sugar,
and I carried them in my pockets for weeks, jingling them in the face of
my envious schoolmates, and at intervals feasting my own eyes upon them.
I fear if I could ever again get hold of such money as that was I should
become a miser.
Hoeing corn, weeding the garden, and picking stone was drudgery, and
haying and harvesting I liked best when they were a good way off;
picking up potatoes worried me, but gathering apples suited my hands and
my fancy better, and knocking "Juno's cushions" in the spring meadows
with my long-handled knocker, about the time the first swallow was heard
laughing overhead, was real fun. I always wanted some element of play in
my work; buckling down to any sort of routine always galled me, and does
yet. The work must be a kind of adventure, and permit of sallies into
free fields. Hence the most acceptable work for me was to be sent
strawberrying or raspberrying by Mother; but the real fun was to
go fishing up Montgomery Hollow, or over on Rose's Brook, this
necessitating a long tramp, and begetting a hunger in a few hours that
made a piece of rye bread the most delectable thing in the world; yet a
pure delight that never sated.
Mother used to bake her bread in the large old-fashioned brick oven, and
once or twice a week we boys had to procure oven wood.
"You must get me oven wood this morning," she would say; "I am going
to bake today." Then we would scurry around for dry, light, quick
wood--pieces of old boxes and boards, and dry limbs. "One more armful,"
she would often say, when we were inclined to quit too soon. In a
half-hour or so, the wood would be reduced to ashes, and the oven
properly heated. I can see Mother yet as she would open the oven door
and feel the air inside with her hand. "Run, quick, and get me a few
more sticks--it is not quite hot enough." When it was ready, the coals
and ashes were raked out, and in went the bread, six or seven big loaves
of rye, with usually two of wheat. The wheat was for company.
When we would come in at dinner- or supper-time and see wheat bread
on the table we would ask: "Who's in the other room?" Maybe the answer
would be, "Your Uncle Martin and Aunt Virey." How glad I would be! I
always liked to see company. Well, the living was better, and then,
company brought a new element into the day; it gave a little tinge of
romance to things. To wake up in the morning and think that Uncle Martin
and Aunt Virey were there, or Uncle Edmund and Aunt Saliny, quickened
the pulse a little. Or, when any of my cousins came,--boys near my own
age,--what joy filled the days! And when they went, how lonesome I would
be! how forlorn all things looked till the second or third day! I early
developed a love of comrades, and was always fond of company--and am
yet, as the records of Slabsides show.
I was quite a hunter in my youth, as most farm boys are, but I never
brought home much game--a gray squirrel, a partridge, or a wild pigeon
occasionally. I think with longing and delight of the myriads of wild
pigeons that used to come every two or three years--covering the sky
for a day or two, and making the naked spring woods gay and festive with
their soft voices and fluttering blue wings. I have seen thousands of
them go through a beech wood, like a blue wave, picking up the sprouting
beechnuts. Those in the rear would be constantly flying over those in
front, so that the effect was that of a vast billow of mingled white and
blue and brown, rustling and murmuring as it went. One spring afternoon
vast flocks of them were passing south over our farm for hours, when
some of them began to pour down in the beech woods on the hill by the
roadside. A part of nearly every flock that streamed by would split off
and, with a downward wheel and rush, join those in the wood. Presently I
seized the old musket and ran out in the road, and then crept up behind
the wall, till only the width of the road separated me from the swarms
of fluttering pigeons. The air and the woods were literally blue with
them, and the ground seemed a yard deep with them. I pointed my gun
across the wall at the surging masses, and then sat there spellbound.
The sound of their wings and voices filled my ears, and their numbers
more than filled my eyes. Why I did not shoot was never very clear to
me. Maybe I thought the world was all turning to pigeons, as they still
came pouring down from the heavens, and I did not want to break the
spell. There I sat waiting, waiting, with my eye looking along the
gun-barrel, till, suddenly, the mass rose like an explosion, and with a
rush and a roar they were gone. Then I came to my senses and with keen
mortification realized what an opportunity I had let slip. Such a chance
never came again, though the last great flight of pigeons did not take
place till 1875.
When I was about ten or twelve, a spell was put upon me by a red fox
in a similar way. The baying of a hound upon the mountain had drawn
me there, armed with the same old musket. It was a chilly day in early
December. I took up my stand in the woods near what I thought might be
the runway, and waited. After a while I stood the butt of my gun upon
the ground, and held the barrel with my hand. Presently I heard a rustle
in the leaves, and there came a superb fox loping along past me, not
fifty feet away. He was evidently not aware of my presence, and, as for
me, I was aware of his presence alone. I forgot that I had a gun, that
here was the game I was in quest of, and that now was my chance to add
to my store of silver quarters. As the unsuspecting fox disappeared over
a knoll, again I came to my senses, and brought my gun to my shoulder;
but it was too late, the game had gone. I returned home full of
excitement at what I had seen, and gave as the excuse why I did not
shoot, that I had my mitten on, and could not reach the trigger of
my gun. It is true I had my mitten on, but there was a mitten, or
something, on my wits also. It was years before I heard the last of that
mitten; when I failed at anything they said, "John had his mitten on, I
guess."
I remember that I had a sort of cosmogony of my own when I was a mere
boy. I used to speculate as to what the world was made of. Partly
closing my eyes, I could see what appeared to be little crooked chains
of fine bubbles floating in the air, and I concluded that that was the
stuff the world was made of. And the philosophers have not yet arrived
at a much more satisfactory explanation.
In thinking of my childhood and youth I try to define to myself wherein
I differed from my brothers and from other boys in the neighborhood,
or wherein I showed any indication of the future bent of my mind. I see
that I was more curious and alert than most boys, and had more interests
outside my special duties as a farm boy. I knew pretty well the ways
of the wild bees and hornets when I was only a small lad. I knew the
different bumblebees, and had made a collection of their combs and
honey before I had entered my teens. I had watched the little frogs, the
hylas, and had captured them and held them till they piped sitting in my
hand. I had watched the leaf-cutters and followed them to their nests in
an old rail, or under a stone. I see that I early had an interest in
the wild life about me that my brothers did not have. I was a natural
observer from childhood, had a quick, sure eye and ear, and an eager
curiosity. I loved to roam the hills and woods and prowl along the
streams, just to come in contact with the wild and the adventurous. I
was not sent to Sunday-school, but was allowed to spend the day as I
saw fit, provided I did not carry a gun or a fishing-rod. Indeed, the
foundation of my knowledge of the ways of the wild creatures was laid
when I was a farm boy, quite unconscious of the natural-history value of
my observations.
What, or who, as I grew up, gave my mind its final push in this
direction would not be easy to name. It is quite certain that I got it
through literature, and more especially through the works of Audubon,
when I was twenty-five or twenty-six years of age.
The sentiment of nature is so full and winsome in the best modern
literature that I was no doubt greatly influenced by it. I was early
drawn to Wordsworth and to our own Emerson and Thoreau, and to the
nature articles in the "Atlantic Monthly," and my natural-history tastes
were stimulated by them.
I have a suspicion that "nature-study" as now followed in the
schools--or shall I say in the colleges?--this classroom peeping and
prying into the mechanism of life, dissecting, probing, tabulating, void
of free observation, and shut away from the open air--would have cured
me of my love of nature. For love is the main thing, the prime thing,
and to train the eye and ear and acquaint one with the spirit of the
great-out-of-doors, rather than a lot of minute facts about nature, is,
or should be, the object of nature-study. Who cares about the anatomy
of the frog? But to know the live frog--his place in the season and the
landscape, and his life-history--is something. If I wanted to instill
the love of nature into a child's heart, I should do it, in the first
place, through country life, and, in the next place, through the best
literature, rather than through classroom investigations, or through
books of facts about the mere mechanics of nature. Biology is all right
for the few who wish to specialize in that branch, but for the mass of
pupils, it is a waste of time. Love of nature cannot be commanded or
taught, but in some minds it can be stimulated.
Sweet were the days of my youth! How I love to recall them and dwell
upon them!--a world apart, separated from the present by a gulf like
that of sidereal space. The old farm bending over the hills and
dipping down into the valleys, the woods, the streams, the springs, the
mountains, and Father and Mother under whose wings I was so protected,
and all my brothers and sisters-how precious the thought of them all!
Can the old farm ever mean to future boys what it meant to me, and enter
so deeply into their lives? No doubt it can, hard as it is to believe
it. The "Bundle place," the "barn on the hill," the "Deacon woods,"
the clover meadow, the "turn in the road," the burying-ground, the
sheep-lot, the bush-lot, the sumac-lot, the "new-barn meadow," the
"old-barn meadow," and so on through the list--each field and section of
the farm had to me an atmosphere and association of its own. The long,
smooth, broad hill--a sort of thigh of the mountain (Old Clump) upon
the lower edge of which the house is planted--shut off the west and
southwest winds; its fields were all amenable to the plough, yielding
good crops of oats, rye, buckwheat, potatoes, or, when in grass,
yielding good pasture, divided east and west by parallel stone walls;
this hill, or lower slope of the mountain, was one of the principal
features of the farm. It was steep, but it was smooth; it was
broad-backed and fertile; its soil was made up mainly of decomposed old
red sandstone. How many times have I seen its different sections grow
ruddy under the side-hill plough! One of my earliest recollections of
my father is seeing him, when I was a child of three or four, striding
across the middle side-hill lot with a bag slung across his breast,
scattering the seed-grain.
How often at early nightfall, while the west was yet glowing, have I
seen the grazing cattle silhouetted against the sky. In the winter the
northwest winds would sweep the snow clean from the other side, and
bring it over to our side and leave it in a long, huge drift that buried
the fences and gave the hill an extra full-breasted appearance. The
breast of the old hill would be padded with ten or fifteen feet of snow.
This drift would often last till May. I have seen it stop the plough.
I remember once carrying a jug of water up to Brother Curtis when his
plough was within a few feet of the snow. Woodchucks would sometimes
feel the spring through this thick coverlid of snow and bore up through
it to the sunlight. I think the woodchuck's alarm clock always goes off
before April is done, and he comes forth, apparently not to break his
long fast, but to find his mate.
I remember working in oats in the middle side-hill lot one September
during the early years of the Civil War, when Hiram was talking of
enlisting as a drummer, and when Father and Mother were much worried
about it. I carried together the sheaves, putting fifteen in a "shock."
I have heard my father tell of a curious incident that once befell his
hired man and himself when they were drawing in oats on a sled from the
first side-hill lot. They had on a load, and the hired man had thrust
his fork into the upper sides of it and was bringing his weight to bear
against its tendency to capsize. But gravity got the better of them and
over went the load; the hired man (Rueb Dart) clung to his fork, and
swung over the load through the air, alighting on his feet none the
worse for the adventure.
The spring that supplies the house and the dairy with water comes from
the middle side-hill lot, some forty or fifty rods from the house, and
is now brought down in pipes; in my time, in pump-logs. It was always an
event when the old logs had to be taken up and new ones put down. I saw
the logs renewed twice in my time; once poplar logs were used, and once
hemlock, both rather short-lived. A man from a neighboring town used
to come with his long auger and bore the logs--a spectacle I was never
tired of looking at.
Then the sap bush in the groin of the hill, and but a few minutes' walk
from the house, what a feature that was! In winter and in summer, what
delightful associations I have with it! I know each of its great sugar
maples as I know my friends or the members of the family. Each has a
character of its own, and in sap-producing capacity they differ greatly.
A fringe of the great trees stood out in the open fields; these were the
earliest to run.
In early March we used to begin to make ready for sugar-making by
overhauling the sap "spiles," resharpening the old ones, and making new
ones. The old-fashioned awkward sap-gouge was used in tapping in those
days, and the "spiles" or spouts were split out of basswood blocks with
this gouge, and then sharpened so as to fit the half-round gash which
the gouge made in the tree. The dairy milk-pans were used to catch the
sap, and huge iron kettles to boil it down in.
When the day came to tap the bush, the caldrons, the hogsheads, and the
two hundred or more pans with the bundles of spiles were put upon the
sled and drawn by the oxen up to the boiling-place in the sap bush.
Father and Brother Hiram did the tapping, using an axe to cut the gash
in the tree, and to drive in the gouge below it to make a place for
the spile, while one of my younger brothers and I carried the pans and
placed them in position.
It was always a glad time with me; the early birds were singing and
calling, the snowbanks were melting, the fields were getting bare, the
roads drying, and spring tokens were on every hand. We gathered the sap
by hand in those days, two pails and a neck-yoke. It was sturdy work.
We would usually begin about three or four o'clock, and by five have the
one hundred and fifty pailfuls of sap in the hogsheads. When the sap ran
all night, we would begin the gathering in the morning. The syruping-off
usually took place at the end of the second day's boiling, when two or
three hundred pailfuls of sap had been reduced to four or five of syrup.
In the March or April twilight, or maybe after dark, we would carry
those heavy pails of syrup down to the house, where the liquid was
strained while still hot. The reduction of it to sugar was done upon the
kitchen stove, from three hundred to five hundred pounds being about the
average annual yield.
The bright warm days at the boiling-place I love best to remember; the
robins running about over the bare ground or caroling from the treetops,
the nuthatches calling, the crows walking about the brown fields, the
bluebirds flitting here and there, the cows lowing or restless in the
barnyard.
When I think of the storied lands across the Atlantic,--England, France,
Germany, Italy, so rich in historical associations, steeped in legend
and poetry, the very look of the fields redolent of the past,--and then
turn to my own native hills, how poor and barren they seem!--not one
touch anywhere of that which makes the charm of the Old World--no
architecture, no great names; in fact, no past. They look naked and
prosy, yet how I love them and cling to them! They are written over with
the lives of the first settlers that cleared the fields and built the
stone walls--simple, common-place lives, worthy and interesting, but
without the appeal of heroism or adventure.
The land here is old, geologically, dating back to the Devonian Age, the
soil in many places of decomposed old red sandstone; but it is new in
human history, having been settled only about one hundred and fifty
years.
Time has worn down the hills and mountains so that all the outlines
of the country are gentle and flowing. The valleys are long, open, and
wide; the hills broad and smooth, no angles or abruptness, or sharp
contrasts anywhere. Hence it is not what is called a picturesque
land--full of bits of scenery that make the artist's fingers itch. The
landscape has great repose and gentleness, so far as long, sweeping
lines and broad, smooth slopes can give this impression. It is a
land which has never suffered violence at the hands of the interior
terrestrial forces; nothing is broken or twisted or contorted or thrust
out or up abruptly. The strata are all horizontal, and the steepest
mountain-slopes clothed with soil that nourishes large forest growths.
I stayed at home, working on the farm in summer and going to school in
winter, till I was seventeen. From the time I was fourteen I had had
a desire to go away to school. I had a craving for knowledge which my
brothers did not share. One fall when I was about fifteen I had the
promise from Father that I might go to school at the Academy in the
village that winter. But I did not go. Then the next fall I had the
promise of going to the Academy at Harpersfield, where one of the
neighbor's boys, Dick Van Dyke, went. How I dreamed of Harpersfield!
That fall I did my first ploughing, stimulated to it by the promise
of Harpersfield. It was in September, in the lot above the sugar
bush--cross-ploughing, to prepare the ground for rye. How many days I
ploughed, I do not remember; but Harpersfield was the lure at the end of
each furrow, I remember that. To this day I cannot hear the name without
seeing a momentary glow upon my mental horizon--a finger of enchantment
is for an instant laid upon me.
But I did not go to Harpersfield. When the time drew near for me to go,
Father found himself too poor, or the expense looked too big--none of
the other boys had had such privileges, and why should I? So I swallowed
my disappointment and attended the home district school for another
winter. Yet I am not sure but I went to Harpersfield after all. The
desire, the yearning to go, the effort to make myself worthy to go, the
mental awakening, and the high dreams, were the main matter. I doubt
if the reality would have given me anything more valuable than these
things. The aspiration for knowledge opens the doors of the mind and
makes ready for her coming.
These were my first and last days at the plough, and they made that
field memorable to me. I never cross it now but I see myself there--a
callow youth being jerked by the plough-handles but with my head in a
cloud of alluring day-dreams. This, I think, was in the fall of 1853. I
went to school that winter with a view to leaving home in the spring to
try my luck at school-teaching in an adjoining county. Many Roxbury boys
had made their first start in the world by going to Ulster County to
teach a country school. I would do the same. So, late in March, 1854,
about the end of the sugar season, I set out for Olive, Ulster County.
An old neighbor, Dr. Hull, lived there, and I would seek him.
There was only a stage-line at that time connecting the two counties,
and that passed twelve miles from my home. My plan was to cross the
mountain into Red Kill to Uncle Martin Kelly's, pass the night there,
and in the morning go to Clovesville, three miles distant, and take
the stage. How well I remember that walk across the mountain in a
snow-squall through which the sun shone dimly, a black oilcloth satchel
in my hand, and in my heart vague yearnings and forebodings! I had but
a few dollars in my pocket, probably six or seven, most of which I had
earned by selling maple sugar. Father was willing I should go, though my
help was needed on the farm.
Well, I traversed the eight miles to my uncle's in good time, and in the
morning he drove me down to the turnpike to take the stage. I remember
well my anxious and agitated state of mind while waiting at the hotel
for the arrival of the stage. I had never ridden in one, I am not sure
that I had even seen one, and I did not know just what was expected
of me, or just how I should deport myself. An untraveled farm boy at
seventeen is such a vague creature anyway, and I was, in addition, such
a bundle of sensibilities, timidities, and embarrassments as few farm
boys are. I paid my fare at the hotel at the rate of a sixpence a mile
for about thirty-two miles, and when the stage came, saw my name entered
upon the "waybill," and got aboard with a beating heart.
Of that first ride of my life in a public conveyance, I remember little.
The stage was one of those old-fashioned rocking Concord coaches, drawn
by four horses. We soon left the snow-clad hills of Delaware County
behind, and dropped down into the milder climate of Ulster, where no
snow was to be seen. About three in the afternoon the stage put me down
at Terry's Tavern on the "plank-road" in Olive. I inquired the way to
Dr. Hull's and found the walk of about a mile an agreeable change. The
doctor and his wife welcomed me cordially. They were old friends of my
family. I spent a day with them, riding about with the doctor on his
visits to patients, and making inquiries for a school in want of a
teacher. On the third day we heard of a vacancy in a district in the
west end of the town, seven or eight miles distant, called Tongore.
Hither I walked one day, saw the trustees, and made my application. I
suspect my youth and general greenness caused them to hesitate; they
would consider and let me know inside of a week. So, in a day or two,
hearing of no other vacancies, I returned home the same way I had come.
It was the first day of April when I made the return trip. I remember
this because at one of the hotels where we changed horses I saw a copper
cent lying upon the floor, and, stooping to pick it up, found it nailed
fast. The bartender and two or three other spectators had a quiet
chuckle at my expense. Before the week was out a letter came from the
Tongore trustees saying I could have the school; wages, ten dollars the
first month, and, if I proved satisfactory, eleven for the other five
months, and "board around."
I remember the handwriting of that letter as if I had received it but
yesterday. "Come at your earliest opportunity." How vividly I recall the
round hand in which those words were written! I replied that I would be
on hand the next week, ready to open school on Monday, the 11th.
Again I took the stage, my father driving me twelve miles to Dimmock's
Corners to meet it, a trip which he made with me many times in after
years. Mother always getting up and preparing our breakfast long before
daylight. We were always in a more or less anxious frame of mind upon
the road lest we be too late for the stage, but only once during the
many trips did we miss it. On that occasion it had passed a few minutes
before we arrived, but, knowing it stopped for breakfast at Griffin's
Corners, four or five miles beyond, I hastened on afoot, running most of
the way, and arrived in sight of it just as the driver had let off the
first crack from his whip to start his reluctant horses. My shouting was
quickly passed to him by the onlookers, he pulled up, and I won the race
quite out of breath.
On the present occasion we were in ample time, and my journey ended at
Shokan, from which place I walked the few miles to Tongore, in the
late April afternoon. The little frogs were piping, and I remember how
homesick the familiar spring sound made me. As I walked along the road
near sundown with this sound in my ears, I saw coming toward me a man
with a gait as familiar as was the piping of the frogs. He turned out
to be our neighbor Warren Scudder, and how delighted I was to see him in
that lonesome land! He had sold a yoke of oxen down there and had been
down to deliver them. The home ties pulled very strongly at sight of
him. Warren's three boys, Reub and Jack and Smith, were our nearest
boy neighbors. His father, old Deacon Scudder, was one of the notable
characters of the town. Warren himself had had some varied experiences.
He was one of the leaders in the anti-rent war of ten years before.
Indeed, he was chief of the band of "Indians" that shot Steel, the
sheriff, at Andes, and it was charged that the bullet from his pistol
was the one that did the fatal work. At any rate, he had had to flee the
country, escaping concealed in a peddler's cart, while close pressed
by the posse. He went South and was absent several years. After the
excitement of the murder and the struggle between the two factions had
died down, he returned and was not molested. And here he was in the
April twilight, on my path to Tongore, and the sight of him cheered my
heart.
I began my school Monday morning, April the 11th, 1854, and continued it
for six months, teaching the common branches to twenty or thirty pupils
from the ages of six to twelve or thirteen. I can distinctly recall
the faces of many of those boys and girls to this day--Jane North, a
slender, clean-cut girl of ten or eleven; Elizabeth McClelland, a fat,
freckled girl of twelve; Alice Twilliger, a thin, talkative girl with a
bulging forehead. Two or three of the boys became soldiers in the Civil
War, and fell in the battle of Gettysburg.
(In April, 1912, Mr. Burroughs received the following: "Hearty
congratulations upon your seventy-fifth birthday, from your old Tongore
pupil of many years ago. R--B--.")
I "boarded round," going home with the children as they invited me. I
was always put in the spare room, and usually treated to warm biscuit
and pie for supper. A few families were very poor, and there I was lucky
to get bread and potatoes. In one house I remember the bedstead was very
shaky, and in the middle of the night, as I turned over, it began to
sway and lurch, and presently all went down in a heap. But I clung to
the wreck till morning, and said nothing about it then.
I remember that a notable eclipse of the sun occurred that spring on the
26th of May, when the farmers were planting their corn.
What books I read that summer I cannot recall. Yes, I recall one--"The
Complete Letter-Writer," which I bought of a peddler, and upon which I
modeled many of my letters to various persons, among others to a Roxbury
girl for whom I had a mild fancy. My first letter to a girl I wrote
to her, and a ridiculously stiff, formal, and awkward letter it was, I
assure you. I am positive I addressed her as "Dear Madam," and started
off with some sentence from "The Complete Letter-Writer," so impressed
was I that there was a best way to do this thing, and that the book
pointed it out. Mary's reply was, "To my absent, but not forgotten
friend," and was simple and natural as girls' letters usually are. My
Grandfather Kelly died that season, and I recall that I wrote a letter
of condolence to my people, modeled upon one in the book. How absurd and
stilted and unreal it must have sounded to them!
Oh, how crude and callow and obtuse I was at that time, full of vague
and tremulous aspirations and awakenings, but undisciplined, uninformed,
with many inherited incapacities and obstacles to weigh me down. I was
extremely bashful, had no social aptitude, and was likely to stutter
when anxious or embarrassed, yet I seem to have made a good impression.
I was much liked in school and out, and was fairly happy. I seem to see
sunshine over all when I look back there. But it was a long summer to
me. I had never been from home more than a day or two at a time before,
and I became very homesick. Oh, to walk in the orchard back of the
house, or along the road, or to see the old hills again--what a Joy it
would have been! But I stuck it out till my term ended in October, and
then went home, taking a young fellow from the district (a brother of
some girls I fancied) with me. I took back nearly all my wages, over
fifty dollars, and with this I planned to pay my way at Hedding Literary
Institute, in the adjoining county of Greene, during the coming winter
term.
I left home for the school late in November, riding the thirty miles
with Father, atop a load of butter. It was the time of year when the
farmers took their butter to Catskill. Father usually made two trips.
This was the first one of the season, and I accompanied him as far as
Ashland, where the Institute was located.
I remained at school there three months, the length of the winter term,
and studied fairly hard. I had a room by myself and enjoyed the life
with the two hundred or more boys and girls of my own age. I studied
algebra, geometry, chemistry, French, and logic, wrote compositions, and
declaimed in the chapel, as the rules required. It was at this time that
I first read Milton. We had to parse in "Paradise Lost," and I recall
how I was shocked and astonished by that celestial warfare. I told one
of my classmates that I did not believe a word of it. Among my teachers
was a young, delicate, wide-eyed man who in later life became well known
as Bishop Hurst, of the Methodist Church. He heard our small class in
logic at seven o'clock in the morning, in a room that was never quite
warmed by the newly kindled fire. I don't know how I came to study logic
(Whately's). I had never heard of such a study before; maybe that is why
I chose it. I got little out of it. What an absurd study, taught, as
it was, as an aid to argumentation!--like teaching a man to walk by
explaining to him the mechanism of walking. The analysis of one sound
argument, or of one weak one, in terms of common sense, is worth any
amount of such stuff. But it was of a piece with grammar and rhetoric
as then taught--all preposterous studies viewed as helps toward correct
writing and speaking. Think of our parsing Milton as an aid to mastering
the English language!
I remember I stood fairly high in composition--only one boy in the
school ahead of me, and that was Herman Coons, to whom I became much
attached, and who became a Methodist minister. He went home with me
during the holiday vacation. After leaving school we corresponded for
several years, and then lost track of each other. I do not know that
there is one of my school-mates of that time now living. I know of none
that became eminent in any field. One of the boys was fatally injured
that winter while coasting. I remember sitting up with him many nights
and ministering to him. He died in a few weeks.
It was an event when Father and Mother came to visit me for a few hours,
and Mother brought me some mince pies. What feasts two or three other
boys and I had in my room over those home-made pies!
Toward spring we had a public debate in the chapel, and I was chosen as
one of the disputants. We debated the question of the Crimean War, which
was on then. I was on the side of England and France against Russia. Our
side won. I think I spoke very well. I remember that I got much of my
ammunition from a paper in "Harper's Magazine," probably by Dr. Osgood.
It seems my fellow on the affirmative had got much of his ammunition
from the same source, and, as I spoke first, there was not much powder
left for him, and he was greatly embarrassed.
What insignificant things one remembers in a world of small events! I
recall how one morning when we had all gathered in chapel for prayers,
none of the professors appeared on the platform but our French teacher,
and, as praying for us was not one of his duties, he hurried off to find
some one to perform that function, while we all sat and giggled.
In the spring of 1855, with eight or ten dollars in my pocket which
Father had advanced me, I made my first visit to New York by steamer
from Catskill, on my way to New Jersey in quest of a position as
school-teacher. Three of our neighborhood boys were then teaching in or
near Plainfield, and I sought them out, having my first ride on the cars
on that trip from Jersey City. As I sat there in my seat waiting for the
train to start, I remember I actually wondered if the starting would be
so sudden as to jerk my hat off!
I was too late to find a vacancy in any of the schools in the districts
I visited. On one occasion I walked from Somerville twelve miles to a
village where there was a vacancy, but the trustees, after looking
me over, concluded I was too young and inexperienced for their large
school. That night the occultation of Venus by the moon took place. I
remember gazing at it long and long.
On my return in May I stopped in New York and spent a day prowling about
the second-hand bookstalls, and spent so much of my money for books that
I had only enough left to carry me to Griffin's Corners, twelve miles
from home. I bought Locke's "Essay on the Human Understanding," Dr.
Johnson's works, Saint-Pierre's "Studies of Nature," and Dick's works
and others. Dick was a Scottish philosopher whose two big fat volumes
held something that caught my mind as I dipped into them. But I got
little from him and soon laid him aside. On this and other trips to New
York I was always drawn by the second-hand bookstalls. How I hovered
about them, how good the books looked, how I wanted them all! To this
day, when I am passing them, the spirit of those days lays its hand upon
me, and I have to pause a few moments and, half-dreaming, half-longing,
run over the titles. Nearly all my copies of the English classics I have
picked up at these curbstone stalls. How much more they mean to me than
new books of later years! Here, for instance, are two volumes of Dr.
Johnson's works in good leather binding, library style, which I have
carried with me from one place to another for over fifty years, and
which in my youth I read and reread, and the style of which I tried
to imitate before I was twenty. When I dip into "The Rambler" and "The
Idler" now how dry and stilted and artificial their balanced sentences
seem! yet I treasure them for what they once were to me. In my first
essay in the "Atlantic," forty-six years ago (in 1860), I said that
Johnson's periods acted like a lever of the third kind, and that the
power applied always exceeded the weight raised; and this comparison
seems to hit the mark very well. I did not read Boswell's Life of him
till much later. In his conversation Johnson got the fulcrum in the
right place.
I reached home on the twentieth of May with an empty pocket and an empty
stomach, but with a bagful of books. I remember the day because the
grass was green, but the air was full of those great "goose-feather"
flakes of snow which sometimes fall in late May.
I stayed home that summer of '55 and worked on the farm, and pored over
my books when I had a chance. I must have found Locke's "Essay" pretty
tough reading, but I remember buckling to it, getting right down on "all
fours," as one has to, to follow Locke.
I think it was that summer that I read my first novel, "Charlotte
Temple," and was fairly intoxicated with it. It let loose a flood of
emotion in me. I remember finishing it one morning and then going out
to work in the hay-field, and how the homely and familiar scenes fairly
revolted me. I dare say the story took away my taste for Locke and
Johnson for a while.
In early September I again turned my face Jerseyward in quest of a
school, but stopped on my way in Olive to visit friends in Tongore. The
school there, since I had left it, had fared badly. One of the teachers
the boys had turned out of doors, and the others had "failed to give
satisfaction"; so I was urged to take the school again. The trustees
offered to double my wages--twenty-two dollars a month. After some
hesitation I gave up the Jersey scheme and accepted the trustees' offer.
It was during that second term of teaching at Tongore that I first
met Ursula North, who later became my wife. Her uncle was one of the
trustees of the school, and I presume it was this connection that
brought her to the place and led to our meeting.
If I had gone on to Jersey in that fall of '55, my life might have been
very different in many ways. I might have married some other girl, might
have had a large family of children, and the whole course of my life
might have been greatly changed. It frightens me now to think that I
might have missed the Washington life, and Whitman,... and much else
that has counted for so much with me. What I might have gained is, in
the scale, like imponderable air.
I read my Johnson and Locke that winter and tried to write a little
in the Johnsonese buckram style. The young man to-day, under the same
conditions, would probably spend his evenings reading novels or the
magazines. I spent mine poring over "The Rambler."
In April I closed the school and went home, again taking a young fellow
with me. I was then practically engaged to Ursula North, and I wrote
her a poem on reaching home. About the middle of April I left home for
Cooperstown Seminary. I rode to Moresville with Jim Bouton, and as the
road between there and Stamford was so blocked with snowdrifts that the
stage could not run, I was compelled to walk the eight miles, leaving
my trunk behind. From Stamford I reached Cooperstown after an all-night
ride by stage.
My summer at Cooperstown was an enjoyable and a profitable one. I
studied Latin, French, English literature, algebra, and geometry. If I
remember correctly, I stood first in composition over the whole school.
I joined the Websterian Society and frequently debated, and was one of
the three or four orators chosen by the school to "orate" in a grove on
the shore of the lake, on the Fourth of July. I held forth in the true
spread-eagle style.
I entered into the sports of the school, ball-playing and rowing on the
lake, with the zest of youth.
One significant thing I remember: I was always on the lookout for books
of essays. It was at this time that I took my first bite into Emerson,
and it was like tasting a green apple--not that he was unripe, but I
wasn't ripe for him. But a year later I tasted him again, and said,
"Why, this tastes good"; and took a bigger bite; then soon devoured
everything of his I could find.
I say I was early on the lockout for books of essays, and I wanted the
essay to begin, not in a casual way by some remark in the first person,
but by the annunciation of some general truth, as most of Dr. Johnson's
did. I think I bought Dick's works on the strength of his opening
sentence--"Man is a compound being."
As one's mind develops, how many changes in taste he passes through!
About the time of which I am now writing, Pope was my favorite poet.
His wit and common sense appealed to me. Young's "Night Thoughts" also
struck me as very grand. Whipple seemed to me a much greater writer than
Emerson. Shakespeare I did not come to appreciate till years later, and
Chaucer and Spenser I have never learned to care for.
I am sure the growth of my literary taste has been along the right
lines--from the formal and the complex, to the simple and direct.
Now, the less the page seems written, that is, the more natural and
instinctive it is, other things being equal, the more it pleases me. I
would have the author take no thought of his style, as such; yet if his
sentences are clothed like the lilies of the field, so much the better.
Unconscious beauty that flows inevitably and spontaneously out of the
subject, or out of the writer's mind, how it takes us!
My own first attempts at writing were, of course, crude enough. It took
me a long time to put aside all affectation and make-believe, if I have
ever quite succeeded in doing it, and get down to what I really saw
and felt. But I think now I can tell dead wood in my writing when I see
it--tell when I fumble in my mind, or when my sentences glance off and
fail to reach the quick.
(In August, 1902, Mr. Burroughs wrote me of a visit to Cooperstown,
after all these years: "I found Cooperstown not much changed. The lake
and the hills were, of course, the same as I had known them forty-six
years ago, and the main street seemed but little altered. Of the old
seminary only the foundations were standing, and the trees had so grown
about it that I hardly knew the place. I again dipped my oar in the
lake, again stood beside Cooper's grave, and threaded some of the
streets I had known so well. I wished I could have been alone there....
I wanted to muse and dream, and invoke the spirit of other days, but the
spirits would not rise in the presence of strangers. I could not quite
get a glimpse of the world as it appeared to me in those callow days. It
was here that I saw my first live author (spoken of in my 'Egotistical
Chapter') and first dipped into Emerson."
After leaving the Seminary at Cooperstown in July of 1856, the young
student worked on the home farm in the Catskills until fall, when he
began teaching school at Buffalo Grove, Illinois, where he taught until
the following spring, returning East to marry, as he says, "the girl I
left behind me."
He then taught in various schools in New York and New Jersey, until the
fall of 1863. As a rule, in the summer he worked on the home farm.
During this period he was reading much, and trying his hand at writing.
There was a short intermission in his teaching, when he invested his
earnings in a patent buckle, and for a brief period he had dreams of
wealth. But the buckle project failed, the dreams vanished, and he began
to read medicine, and resumed his teaching.
From 1859 to 1862 he was writing much, on philosophical subjects mainly.
It was in 1863 that he first became interested in the birds.--C. B.)
Ever since the time when in my boyhood I saw the strange bird in the
woods of which I have told you, the thought had frequently occurred to
me, "I shall know the birds some day." But nothing came of the thought
and wish till the spring of '63, when I was teaching school near West
Point. In the library of the Military Academy, which I frequently
visited of a Saturday, I chanced upon the works of Audubon. I took fire
at once. It was like bringing together fire and powder! I was ripe for
the adventure; I had leisure, I was in a good bird country, and I
had Audubon to stimulate me, as well as a collection of mounted birds
belonging to the Academy for reference. How eagerly and joyously I took
up the study! It fitted in so well with my country tastes and breeding;
it turned my enthusiasm as a sportsman into a new channel; it gave to my
walks a new delight; it made me look upon every grove and wood as a
new storehouse of possible treasures. I could go fishing or camping
or picknicking now with my resources for enjoyment doubled. That first
hooded warbler that I discovered and identified in a near-by bushy field
one Sunday morning--shall I ever forget the thrill of delight it gave
me? And when in August I went with three friends into the Adirondacks,
no day or place or detention came amiss to me; new birds were calling
and flitting on every hand; a new world was opened to me in the midst of
the old.
At once I was moved to write about the birds, and I began my first
paper, "The Return of the Birds," that fall, and finished it in
Washington, whither I went in October, and where I lived for ten years.
Writing about the birds and always treating them in connection with the
season and their environment, was, while I was a government clerk, a
kind of vacation. It enabled me to live over again my days amid the
sweet rural things and influences. The paper just referred to is, as you
may see, mainly written out of my memories as a farm boy. The enthusiasm
which Audubon had begotten in me quickened and gave value to all my
youthful experiences and observations of the birds.
(This brings us to the time when our subject is fairly launched on early
manhood. He has regular employment--a clerkship in the office of the
Comptroller of the Currency, which, if not especially congenial in
itself, affords him leisure to do the things he most wishes to do. He is
even now growing in strength and efficiency as an essayist.--C. B.)