Our Friend John Burroughs

by Clara Barrus

I am certain, as I have told you before, that I derived more from my mother than from my father. I have more of her disposition—her yearning, breeding nature, her subdued and neutral tones, her curiosity, her love of animals, and of wild nature generally. Father was neither a hunter nor a fisherman, and, I think, was rarely conscious of the beauty of nature around him. The texture of his nature was much less fine than that of Mother's, and he was a much easier problem to read; he was as transparent as glass. Mother had more of the stuff of poetry in her soul, and a deeper, if more obscure, background to her nature. That which makes a man a hunter or a fisherman simply sent her forth in quest of wild berries. What a berry-picker she was! How she would work to get the churning out of the way so she could go out to the berry lot! It seemed to heal and refresh her to go forth in the hill meadows for strawberries, or in the old bushy bark-peelings for raspberries. The last work she did in the world was to gather a pail of blackberries as she returned one September afternoon from a visit to my sister's, less than a mile away.

I am as fond of going forth for berries as my mother was, even to this day. Every June I must still make one or two excursions to distant fields for wild strawberries, or along the borders of the woods for black raspberries, and I never go without thinking of Mother. You could not see all that I bring home with me in my pail on such occasions; if you could, you would see the traces of daisies and buttercups and bobolinks, and the blue skies, with thoughts of Mother and the Old Home, that date from my youth. I usually eat some of the berries in bread and milk, as I was wont to do in the old days, and am, for the moment, as near a boy again as it is possible for me to be.

(Illustration of One of Mr. Burroughs's Favorite Seats, Roxbury, New York. From a photograph by Clifton Johnson)

No doubt my life as a farm boy has had much to do with my subsequent love of nature, and my feeling of kinship with all rural things. I feel at home with them; they are bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. It seems to me a man who was not born and reared in the country can hardly get Nature into his blood, and establish such intimate and affectionate relations with her, as can the born countryman. We are so susceptible and so plastic in youth; we take things so seriously; they enter into and color and feed the very currents of our being. As a child I think I must have been more than usually fluid and impressionable, and that my affiliations with open-air life and objects were very hearty and thorough. As I grow old I am experiencing what, I suppose, all men experience, more or less; my subsequent days slough off, or fade away, more and more, leaving only the days of my youth as a real and lasting possession.

When I began, in my twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth year, to write about the birds, I found that I had only to unpack the memories of the farm boy within me to get at the main things about the common ones. I had unconsciously absorbed the knowledge that gave the life and warmth to my page. Take that farm boy out of my books, out of all the pages in which he is latent as well as visibly active, and you have robbed them of something vital and fundamental, you have taken from the soil much of its fertility. At least, so it seems to me, though in this business of self-analysis I know one may easily go far astray. It is probably quite impossible correctly to weigh and appraise the many and complex influences and elements that have entered into one's life.

When I look back to that twilight of early youth, to that half-mythical borderland of the age of six or seven years, or even earlier, I can see but few things that, in the light of my subsequent life, have much significance. One is the impression made upon me by a redbird which the "hired girl" brought in from the woodpile, one day with a pail of chips. She had found the bird lying dead upon the ground. That vivid bit of color in the form of a bird has never faded from my mind, though I could not have been more than three or four years old.

Another bird incident, equally vivid, I have related in "Wake-Robin," in the chapter called "The Invitation,"—the vision of the small bluish bird with a white spot on its wing, one Sunday when I was six or seven years old, while roaming with my brothers in the "Deacon woods" near home. The memory of that bird stuck to me as a glimpse of a world of birds that I knew not of.

Still another bird incident that is stamped upon my memory must have occurred about the same time. Some of my brothers and an older boy neighbor and I were walking along a road in the woods when a brown bird flew down from a bush upon the ground in front of us. "A brown thrasher," the older boy said. It was doubtless either the veery, or the hermit thrush, and this was my first clear view of it. Thus it appears that birds stuck to me, impressed me from the first. Very early in my life the coming of the bluebird, the phoebe, the song sparrow, and the robin, in the spring, were events that stirred my emotions, and gave a new color to the day. When I had found a bluebird's nest in the cavity of a stump or a tree, I used to try to capture the mother bird by approaching silently and clapping my hand over the hole; in this I sometimes succeeded, though, of course, I never harmed the bird. I used to capture song sparrows in a similar way, by clapping my hat over the nest in the side of the bank along the road.

I can see that I was early drawn to other forms of wild life, for I distinctly remember when a small urchin prying into the private affairs of the "peepers" in the marshes in early spring, sitting still a long time on a log in their midst, trying to spy out and catch them in the act of peeping. And this I succeeded in doing, discovering one piping from the top of a bulrush, to which he clung like a sailor to a mast; I finally allayed the fears of one I had captured till he sat in the palm of my hand and piped—a feat I have never been able to repeat since.

I studied the ways of the bumblebees also, and had names of my own for all the different kinds. One summer I made it a point to collect bumblebee honey, and I must have gathered a couple of pounds. I found it very palatable, though the combs were often infested with parasites. The small red-banded bumblebees that lived in large colonies in holes in the ground afforded me the largest yields. A large bee, with a broad light-yellow band, was the ugliest customer to deal with. It was a fighter and would stick to its enemy like grim death, following me across the meadow and often getting in my hair, and a few times up my trousers leg, where I had it at as great a disadvantage as it had me. It could stab, and I could pinch, and one blow followed the other pretty rapidly.