Mr. Burrough’s permanent home is at West Park, on the Hudson River, a few miles south of Kingston. Here he has a farm mostly devoted to the cultivation of grapes. He occupies a comfortable stone house, pleasantly situated and nearly surrounded by trees of various kinds. Back of the house and near the river is the study or den, a little rustic building on the slope of the hill, where Mr. Burroughs can write undisturbed by the business of the farm. The walls are partly lined with bookshelves, well crowded with favorite volumes. Near by is a small rustic summer house from which a delightful view of the river may be seen for miles to the north and to the south. This is why the place is called “Riverby”—simply “by-the-river.” It has been the author’s home for many years.

Even the study, however, did not satisfy Mr. Burroughs’s longing for quiet, and so he built another retreat about a mile and a half west of the village which he calls “Slabsides.” It is reached by walking up a hill and passing through a bit of hemlock woods which I found quite charming. Slabsides is a rustic house like many camps in the Adirondacks. It is roughly built, but sufficiently comfortable, and has a pleasant little porch, at the entrance to which a climbing vine gives a picturesque effect which is greatly enhanced by a stone chimney, now almost completely clothed with foliage. It is in an out-of-the-way hollow of the woods where nobody would be likely to come except for the express purpose of visiting Mr. Burroughs. For several summers this was his favorite retreat. He would walk over from his home at Riverby and stay perhaps two or three weeks at a time, doing his own cooking and housekeeping. Of late years, however, Slabsides has been less frequently used, Woodchuck Lodge having received the preference.

All of these abodes, whether you see them within or without, reveal the secret of John Burroughs’s strength. They coincide with his personal appearance, his dress, his conversation, his manner. It is the strength of absolute simplicity. Everything is sincere. Nothing is superfluous. There is no such thing as “putting on airs.” Fame and popularity have not spoiled him. He is genuine. You feel it when you see his workshops. You know it when you meet the man.

Mr. Charles Wagner, the apostle of “the simple life,” has said, “All the strength of the world and all true joy, everything that consoles, that feeds hope, or throws a ray of light along our dark paths, everything that makes us see across our poor lives a splendid goal and a boundless future, comes to us from people of simplicity, those who have made another object of their desires than the passing satisfaction and vanity, and have understood that the art of living is to know how to give one’s life.”

John Burroughs is one of these “people of simplicity,” and his contribution to our happiness lies in his rare power of bringing to his reader something of his own enjoyment of Nature—an enjoyment which he has been able to obtain only through the living of a simple life. He is the complete embodiment of Emerson’s “forest seer”:—

“Many haps fall in the field Seldom seen by wishful eyes; But all her shows did Nature yield, To please and win this pilgrim wise. He saw the partridge drum in the woods; He heard the woodcock’s evening hymn; He found the tawny thrushes’ broods; And the shy hawk did wait for him; What others did at distance hear, And guessed within the thicket’s gloom, Was shown to this philosopher And at his bidding seemed to come.”

IX
GLIMPSES OF THE YELLOWSTONE