"Come and go to Slabsides for over Sunday--I think we can keep warm. We
will have an old-fashioned time; I will roast a duck in the pot; it will
be great fun."
This invitation came from Mr. Burroughs in 1911 to friends who proposed
to call on him early in December. Riverby was closed for the season, its
occupants tarrying in Poughkeepsie, but, ever ready for an adventure,
the Sage of Slabsides proposed a winter picnic at his cabin in the
hills.
A ride of some two hours from New York brings us to West Park, where our
host awaits us. A stranger, glancing at his white hair and beard, might
credit his seventy-five years, but not when looking at his ruddy face
with the keen, bright eyes, or at his alert, vigorous movements.
Together with blankets and a market-basket of provisions we are stowed
away in a wagon and driven up the steep, winding way; at first along a
country road, then into a wood's road with huge Silurian rocks cropping
out everywhere, showing here and there seams of quartz and patches of
moss and ferns.
"In there," said Mr. Burroughs, pointing to an obscure path, "I had a
partridge for a neighbor. She had a nest there. I went to see her every
day till she became uneasy about it, and let me know I was no longer
welcome."
"Yonder," he continued, indicating a range of wooded hills against the
wintry sky, "is the classic region of 'Popple Town Hill,' and over there
is 'Pang Yang.'"
Some friendly spirit has preceded us to the cabin; a fire is burning in
the great stone fireplace, and mattresses and bedding are exposed to the
heat. Moving these away, the host makes room for us near the hearth. He
piles on the wood, and we are soon permeated by the warmth of the fire
and of the unostentatious hospitality of Slabsides.
How good it is to be here! The city, with its rush and roar and
complexities, seems far away. How satisfying it is to strip off the
husks and get at the kernel of things! There is more chance for high
thinking when one is big enough to have plain living. How we surround
ourselves with non-essentials, how we are dominated with the "mania
of owning things"--one feels all this afresh in looking around at this
simple, well-built cabin with its few needful things close at hand, and
with life reduced to the simplest terms. One sees here exemplified the
creed Mr. Burroughs outlined several years ago in his essay "An Outlook
upon Life":--
I am bound to praise the simple life, because I have lived it and found
it good.... I love a small house, plain clothes, simple living. Many
persons know the luxury of a skin bath--a plunge in the pool or the wave
unhampered by clothing. That is the simple life--direct and immediate
contact with things, life with the false wrappings torn away--the fine
house, the fine equipage, the expensive habits, all cut off. How free
one feels, how good the elements taste, how close one gets to them, how
they fit one's body and one's soul! To see the fire that warms you, or
better yet, to cut the wood that feeds the fire that warms you; to see
the spring where the water bubbles up that slakes your thirst, and to
dip your pail into it; to see the beams that are the stay of your four
walls, and the timbers that uphold the roof that shelters you; to be in
direct and personal contact with the sources of your material life; to
want no extras, no shields; to find the universal elements enough; to
find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning
walk or an evening saunter; to find a quest of wild berries more
satisfying than a gift of tropic fruit; to be thrilled by the stars
at night; to be elated over a bird's nest, or over a wild flower in
spring--these are some of the rewards of the simple life.
(Illustration of The Living-Room. From a photograph by M. H. Fanning)
The two men were soon talking companionably. When persons of wide
reading and reflection, and of philosophic bent, who have lived long
and been mellowed by life, come together, the interchange of thought is
bound to be valuable; things are so well said, so inevitably said, that
the listener thinks he cannot forget the manner of saying; but thoughts
crowd thick and fast, comments on men and measures, on books and events,
are numerous and varied, but hard to recapture. The logs ignite, sending
out their cheering heat, the coals glow, the sparks fly upward, warmth
and radiance envelop us; but an attempt to warm the reader by the
glow of that fireside talk is almost as futile as an effort to dispel
to-day's cold by the fire of yesterday.
A few deserted cottages perched on the rocks near by show us where the
summer neighbors of our host live, but at all seasons his wild neighbors
are the ones he hobnobs with the most; while his indoor companions are
Montaigne, Sainte-Beuve, Carlyle, Arnold, Wordsworth, Darwin, Huxley,
Emerson, Whitman, Bergson, and many others, ancient and modern.
"I've been rereading Emerson's essay on 'Immortality' lately, evenings
in my study down there by the river," said Mr. Burroughs. "I had
forgotten it was so noble and fine--he makes much of the idea of
permanence."
In this connection he spoke of John Fiske and his contributions to
literature, telling of the surprise he felt on first meeting Fiske
at Harvard, to see the look of the _bon vivant_ in one in whom the
intellectual and the spiritual were so prominent. Laughing, he recalled
the amusement of the college boys at Fiske's comical efforts to discover
a piece of chalk dropped during his lecture on "Immortality." Standing
on the hearth, a merry twinkle in his eyes, he recited some humorous
lines which he had written concerning the episode.
Reverting to the question of immortality in a serious vein, he summed up
the debated question much as he has done in one of his essays,--that it
has been good to be here, and will be good to go hence; that we know not
whence we come, nor whither we go; were not consulted as to our coming,
and shall not be as to our going; but that it is all good; all for "the
glory of God;" though we must use this phrase in a larger sense than the
cramped interpretation of the theologian. All the teeming life of
the globe, the millions on millions in the microscopic world, and
the millions on millions of creatures that can be seen by the naked
eye--those who have been swept away, those here now, those who will come
after--all appearing in their appointed time and place, playing their
parts and vanishing, and to the old question "Why?" we may as well
answer, "For the glory of God"; if we will only conceive a big enough
glory, and a big enough God. His utter trust in things as they are
seemed a living embodiment of that sublime line in "Waiting"--
"I stand amid the Eternal ways";
and, thus standing, he is content to let the powers that be have their
way with him.
"To all these mysteries I fall back upon the last words I heard Whitman
say, shortly before the end--commonplace words, but they sum it up:
'It's all right, John, it's all right'; but Whitman had the active,
sustaining faith in immortality--
'I laugh at what you call dissolution,
And I know the amplitude of time.'"
As the afternoon wanes, Mr. Burroughs hangs the kettle on the crane,
broils the chops, and with a little help from one of the guests, soon
has supper on the table, a discussion of Bergson's philosophy suffering
only occasional interruptions; such as, "Where _have_ those women
(summer occupants of Slabsides) put my holder?" or, "See if there isn't
some salt in the cupboard."
"There! I forgot to bring up eggs for breakfast, but here are other
things," he mutters as he rummages in his market-basket. "That memory of
mine is pretty tricky; sometimes I can't remember things any better than
I can find them when they are right under my nose. I've just found
a line from Emerson that I've been hunting for two days--'The worm
striving to be man.' I looked my Emerson through and through, and no
worm; then I found in Joel Benton's Concordance of Emerson that the line
was in 'May-Day'; he even cited the page, but my Emerson had no printing
on that page. I searched all through 'May-Day,' and still no worm; I
looked again with no better success, and was on the point of giving up
when I spied the worm--it almost escaped me--"
"It must have turned, didn't it?"
"Yes, the worm surely turned, or I never should have seen it," he
confessed.
The feminine member of the trio wields the dish-mop while the host dries
the dishes, and the Dreamer before the fire luxuriates in the thought
that his help is not needed.
The talk on philosophy and religion does not make the host forget
to warm sheets and blankets and put hot bricks in the beds to insure
against the fast-gathering cold.
The firelight flickers on the bark-covered rafters, lighting up the
yellow-birch partition between living-room and bedroom downstairs, and
plays upon the rustic stairway that leads to the two rooms overhead, as
we sit before the hearth in quiet talk. Outside the moonlight floods
the great open space around the cabin, revealing outlines of the rocky
inclosure. No sounds in all that stillness without, and within only the
low voices of the friends, and the singing logs.
Mr. Burroughs tells of his visit, in October, to the graves of his
maternal grandparents:--
"They died in 1854, my first season away from home, and there they have
lain for fifty-seven years, and I had never been to their graves! I'm
glad I went; it made them live again for me. How plainly I could see the
little man in his blue coat with brass buttons, with his decidedly Irish
features! And Grandmother, a stout woman, with quaint, homely ways. The
moss is on their gravestones now, and two evergreen trees wax strong
above them. I found an indigo-bird had built her nest above their
graves. I broke off the branch and brought it home."
"There! get up and use that water before it freezes over," the host
calls out the next morning, as, mounting the stairs, he places a pitcher
of hot water by the door. It is bitter cold, one's fingers ache, and one
wonders if, after all, it is so much fun to live in a cabin in the woods
in the dead of winter. But a crackling fire below and savory smells of
bacon and coffee reconcile one, and the day begins right merrily.
And what a dinner the author sets before us! what fun to see him prepare
it, discussing meanwhile the glory that was Greece and the grandeur
that was Rome, recounting anecdotes of boyhood, touching on politics and
religion, on current events, on conflicting views of the vitalists and
the chemico-physicists, on this and on that, but never to the detriment
of his duck. It is true he did serenely fold his hands and wait, between
times. Then what an event to see him lift the smoking cover and try the
bird with a fork--" to see if the duck is relenting," he explains. At a
certain time he arises from a grave psychological discussion to rake out
hollow places in the coals where he buries potatoes and onions.
"The baking of an onion," he declares, "takes all the conceit out of
him. He is sweet and humble after his baptism of fire." Then the
talk soars above ducks and onions, until he gives one of the idlers
permission to prepare the salad and lay the table.
For a dinner to remember all one's days, commend me to a thoroughly
relented duck; a mealy, ash-baked potato; an onion (yea, several of
them) devoid of conceit, and well buttered and salted; and a salad
of Slabsides celery and lettuce; with Riverby apples and pears, and
beechnuts to complete the feast--beechnuts gathered in October up in
the Catskills, gathered one by one as the chipmunk gathers them, by the
"Laird of Woodchuck Lodge," as he is called on his native heath, though
he is one and the same with the master of Slabsides.
We hear no sounds all the day outside the cabin but the merry calls of
chickadees, until in mid-afternoon an unwelcome "Halloa!" tells us
the wagon is come to take us down to Riverby. Reluctantly the fire is
extinguished, and the wide, hospitable door of Slabsides closes behind
us.
Riverby, "the house that Jack built," as the builder boasted, is a
house interesting and individual, though conforming somewhat to the
conventions of the time when it was built (1874). It is as immaculate
within as its presiding genius can make it, presenting a sharp contrast
to the easy-going housekeeping of the mountain cabin.
We tarry a few minutes in the little bark-covered study, detached from
the house and overlooking the Hudson, where Mr. Burroughs does his
writing when at home; we see the rustic summer-house near by, and the
Riverby vineyards, formerly husbanded by "the Vine-Dresser of Esopus,"
as his friends used to call him; now by his son Julian, who combines,
like his father before him, grape-growing with essay-writing.
A pleasant hour is spent in the artistic little cottage, planned and
built by the author and his son, where live Mr. Julian Burroughs and
his family. Here the grandfather has many a frolic with his three
grandchildren, who know him as "Baba." John Burroughs the younger is his
special pride. Who knows but the naturalist stands somewhat in awe of
his grandson?--for as the youngster reaches for his "Teddy," and says
sententiously, "Bear!" the elder never ventures a word about the dangers
of "sham natural history."
Boarding the West Shore train, laden with fruit and beechnuts and
pleasant memories, we return to the city's roar and whirl, dreaming
still of the calls of chickadees in the bare woods and of quiet hours
before the fire at Slabsides.