Our Friend John Burroughs

by Clara Barrus

I have always looked upon myself as a kind of sport; I came out of the air quite as much as out of my family. All my weaknesses and insufficiencies—and there are a lot of them—are inherited, but of my intellectual qualities, there is not much trace in my immediate forbears. No scholars or thinkers or lovers of books, or men of intellectual pursuits for several generations back of me—all obscure farmers or laborers in humble fields, rather grave, religiously inclined men, I gather, sober, industrious, good citizens, good neighbors, correct livers, but with no very shining qualities. My four brothers were of this stamp—home-bodies, rather timid, non-aggressive men, somewhat below the average in those qualities and powers that insure worldly success—the kind of men that are so often crowded to the wall. I can see myself in some of them, especially in Hiram, who had daydreams, who was always going West, but never went; who always wanted some plaything—fancy sheep or pigs or poultry; who was a great lover of bees and always kept them; who was curious about strange lands, but who lost heart and hope as soon as he got beyond the sight of his native hills; and who usually got cheated in every bargain he made. Perhaps it is because I see myself in him that Hiram always seemed nearer to me than any of the rest. I have at times his vagueness, his indefiniteness, his irresolution, and his want of spirit when imposed upon.

Poor Hiram! One fall in his simplicity he took his fancy Cotswold sheep to the State Fair at Syracuse, never dreaming but that a farmer entirely outside of all the rings and cliques, and quite unknown, could get the prize if his stock was the best. I can see him now, hanging about the sheep-pens, homesick, insignificant, unnoticed, living on cake and pie, and wondering why a prize label was not put upon his sheep. Poor Hiram! Well, he marched up the hill with his sheep, and then he marched down again, a sadder and, I hope, a wiser man.

Once he ordered a fancy rifle, costing upwards of a hundred dollars, of a gunsmith in Utica. When the rifle came, it did not suit him, was not according to specifications; so he sent it back. Not long after that the man failed and no rifle came, and the money was not returned. Then Hiram concluded to make a journey out there. I was at home at the time, and can see him yet as he started off along the road that June day, off for Utica on foot. Again he marched up the hill, and then marched down, and no rifle or money ever came.

For years he had the Western fever, and kept his valise under his bed packed ready for the trip. Once he actually started and got as far as White Pigeon, Michigan. There his courage gave out, and he came back. Still he kept his valise packed, but the end of his life's journey came before he was ready to go West again.

Hiram, as you know, came to live with me at Slabsides during the last years of his life. He had made a failure of it on the old farm, after I had helped him purchase it; nearly everything had gone wrong, indoors and out; and he was compelled to give it up. So he brought his forty or more skips of bees to West Park and lived with me, devoting himself, not very successfully, to bee-culture. He loved to "fuss" with bees. I think the money he got for his honey looked a little more precious to him than other money, just as the silver quarters I used to get when a boy for the maple sugar I made had a charm and a value no quarters have ever had in my eyes since.

That thing in Hiram that was so appealed to by his bee-culture, and by any fancy strain of sheep or poultry, is strong in me, too, and has played an important part in my life. If I had not taken it out in running after wild nature and writing about it I should probably have been a bee-man, or a fancy-stock farmer. As it is, I have always been a bee-lover, and have usually kept several swarms. Ordinary farming is prosy and tiresome compared with bee-farming. Combined with poultry-raising, it always had special attractions for me. When I was a farm boy of twelve or thirteen years, one of our neighbors had a breed of chickens with large topknots that filled my eye completely. My brother and I used to hang around the Chase henyard for hours, admiring and longing for those chickens. The impression those fowls made upon me seems as vivid to-day as it was when first made. The topknot was the extra touch—the touch of poetry that I have always looked for in things, and that Hiram, in his way, craved and sought for, too.

There was something, too, in my maternal grandfather that probably foreshadowed the nature-lover and nature-writer. In him it took the form of a love of angling, and a love for the Bible. He went from the Book to the stream, and from the stream to the Book, with great regularity. I do not remember that he ever read the newspapers, or any other books than the Bible and the hymn-book. When he was over eighty years, old he would woo the trout-streams with great success, and between times would pore over the Book till his eyes were dim. I do not think he ever joined the church, or ever made an open profession of religion, as was the wont in those days; but he had the religious nature which he nursed upon the Bible. When a mere boy, as I have before told you, he was a soldier under Washington, and when the War of 1812 broke out, and one of his sons was drafted, he was accepted and went in his stead. The half-wild, adventurous life of the soldier suited him better than the humdrum of the farm. From him, as I have said, I get the dash of Celtic blood in my veins—that almost feminine sensibility and tinge of melancholy that, I think, shows in all my books. That emotional Celt, ineffectual in some ways, full of longings and impossible dreams, of quick and noisy anger, temporizing, revolutionary, mystical, bold in words, timid in action—surely that man is in me, and surely he comes from my revolutionary ancestor, Grandfather Kelly.

I think of the Burroughs branch of my ancestry as rather retiring, peace-loving, solitude-loving men—men not strongly sketched in on the canvas of life, not self-assertive, never roistering or uproarious—law-abiding, and church-going. I gather this impression from many sources, and think it is a correct one.

Oh, the old farm days! how the fragrance of them still lingers in my heart! the spring with its farm, the returning birds, and the full, lucid trout-streams; the summer with its wild berries, its haying, its cool, fragrant woods; the fall with its nuts, its game, its apple-gathering, its holidays; the winter with its school, its sport on ice and snow, its apple-bins in the cellar, its long nights by the fireside, its voice of fox-bounds on the mountains, its sound of flails in the barn—how much I still dream about these things!

But I am slow in keeping my promise to try to account for myself. Yet all these things are a part of my antecedents; they entered into my very blood—father and mother and brothers and sisters, and the homely life of the farm, all entered into and became a part of that which I am.