Our Friend John Burroughs

by Clara Barrus

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.