On my father's side I find no fishermen or hermits or dreamers. I find a marked religious strain, more active and outspoken than on Mother's. The religion of the Kellys was, for the most part, of the silent, meditative kind, but there are preachers and teachers and scholars on Father's side—one of them, Stephen Burroughs (b. 1765), a renegade preacher. Doubtless most of my own intellectual impetus comes from this side of the family. There are also cousins and second cousins on this side who became preachers, and some who became physicians, but I recall none on the Kelly side.
In size and physical make-up I am much like my father. I have my father's foot, and I detect many of his ways in my own. My loud and harmless barking, when I am angered, I get from him. The Kellys are more apt to bite. I see myself, too, in my brothers, in their looks and especially in their weaknesses. Take from me my special intellectual equipment, and I am in all else one of them.
(Speaking of their characteristics as a family, Mr. Burroughs says that they have absolute inability to harbor resentment (a Celtic trait); that they never have "cheek" to ask enough for what they have to sell, lack decision, and are easily turned from their purpose. Commenting on this, he has often said: "We are weak as men—do not make ourselves felt in the community. But this very weakness is a help to me as a writer upon Nature. I don't stand in my own light. I get very close to bird and beast. My thin skin lets the shy and delicate influences pass. I can surrender myself to Nature without effort. I am like her.... That which hinders me with men, makes me strong with impersonal Nature, and admits me to her influences.... I am lacking in moral fibre, but am tender and sympathetic.")
To see Mr. Burroughs stand and fondly gaze upon the fruitful, well-cultivated fields that his father had cared for so many years, to hear him say that the hills are like father and mother to him, was to realize how strong is the filial instinct in him—that and the home feeling. As he stood on the crest of the big hill by the pennyroyal rock, looking down on the peaceful homestead in the soft light of a midsummer afternoon, his eye roamed fondly over the scene:—
"How fertile and fruitful it is now, but how lonely and bleak the old place looked in that winter landscape the night I drove up from the station in the moonlight after hearing of Father's death! There was a light in the window, but I knew Father would not meet me at the door this time—beleaguering winter without, and Death within!
"Father and Mother! I think of them with inexpressible love and yearning, wrapped in their last eternal sleep. They had, for them, the true religion, the religion of serious, simple, hard-working. God-fearing lives. To believe as they did, to sit in their pews, is impossible to me—the Time-Spirit has decreed otherwise; but all I am or can be or achieve is to emulate their virtues—my soul can be saved only by a like truthfulness and sincerity."
The following data concerning his brothers and sisters were given me by Mr. Burroughs in conversation:—
Hiram, born in 1827, was an unpractical man and a dreamer; he was a bee-keeper. He showed great aptitude in the use of tools, could make axe-handles, neck-yokes, and the various things used about the farm, and was especially skilled in building stone walls. But he could not elbow his way in a crowd, could not make farming pay, and was always pushed to the wall. He cared nothing for books, and although he studied grammar when a boy, and could parse, he never could write a grammatical sentence. He died at the age of seventy-five.
Olly Ann was about two years younger than Hiram. Mr. Burroughs remembers her as a frail, pretty girl, with dark-brown eyes, a high forehead, and a wasp-like waist. She had a fair education for her time, married and had two children, and died in early womanhood of phthisis.
Wilson was a farmer, thrifty and economical. He married but had no children. He was evidently somewhat neurotic; as a child, even when well, he would groan and moan in his sleep, and he died, at the age of twenty-eight, after a short illness, of a delirious fever.