On the drive up from the village he showed me the place, a mile or more from their haunts on the breezy mountain lands, where the sheep were driven annually to be washed. It was a deep pool then, and a gristmill stood near by. He said he could see now the huddled sheep, and the overhanging rocks with the phoebes' nests in the crevices.
"Down in the Hollow," as they call the village of Robbery, he drew my attention to the building which was once the old academy, and where he had his dream of going to school. He remembers as a lad of thirteen going down to the village one evening to hear a man, McLaurie, talk up the academy before there was one in Roxbury. "I remember it as if it were yesterday; a few of the leading men of the village were there. I was the only boy. I've wondered since what possessed me to go. In his talk the man spoke of what a blessing it would be to boys of that vicinity, pointing me out and saying, 'Now, like that boy, there.' I recall how I dropped my head and blushed. He was a small man, very much in earnest. When I heard of his death a few years ago, it gave me long, long thoughts. He finally got the academy going, taught it, and had a successful school there for several years, but I never got there. The school in the West Settlement, Father thought, was good enough for me. But my desire to go, and dreaming of it, impressed it and him upon me more, perhaps, than the boys who really went were impressed. How outside of it all I felt when I used to go down there to the school exhibitions! It was after that that I had my dream of going to Harpersfield Seminary—the very name had a romantic sound. Though Father had promised me I might go, when the time came he couldn't afford it; he didn't mean to go back on his word, but there was very little money—I wonder how they got along so well as they did with so little."
"As a boy it had been instilled into my mind that God would strike one dead for mocking him. One day Ras Jenkins and I were crossing this field when it began to thunder. Ras turned up his lips to the clouds contemptuously. 'Oh, don't, you'll be struck,' I cried, cringing in expectation of the avenging thunderbolt. What a revelation it was when he was not struck! I immediately began to think, 'Now, maybe God isn't so easily offended as I thought'; but it seemed to me any God with dignity ought to have been offended by such an act."
Mr. Burroughs showed me the old rosebush in the pasture, all that was left to mark the site where a house had once stood; even before his boyhood days this house had become a thing of the past. The roses, though, had always been a joy to him, and had played such a part in his early days that he had transplanted some of the old bush to a spot near his doorsteps at Slabsides. Once when he sent me some of the roses he wrote of them thus: "The roses of my boyhood! Take the first barefooted country lad you see with homemade linen trousers and shirt, and ragged straw hat, and put some of these roses in his hand, and you see me as I was fifty-five years ago. They are the identical roses, mind you. Sometime I will show you the bush in the old pasture where they grew."
One day we followed the course he and his brothers and sisters used to take on their way to school. Leaving the highway near the old graveyard, we went down across a meadow, then through a beech wood, and on through the pastures in the valley along which a trout brook used to flow, on across more meadows and past where a neglected orchard was, till we came to where the little old schoolhouse itself stood.
How these trout streams used to lure him to play hookey! All the summer noonings, too, were spent there. He spoke feelingly of the one that coursed through the hemlocks—"loitering, log-impeded, losing itself in the dusky, fragrant depths of the hemlocks." They used to play hookey down at Stratton Falls, too, and get the green streaks in the old red sandstone rocks to make slate pencils of, trying them on their teeth to make sure they were soft enough not to scratch their slates. The woods have been greatly mutilated in which they used to loiter on the way to school and gather crinkle-root to eat with their lunches,—though they usually ate it all up before lunch-time came, he said. In one of his books Mr. Burroughs speaks of a schoolmate who, when dying, said, "I must hurry, I have a long way to go over a hill and through a wood, and it is getting dark." This was his brother Wilson, and he doubtless had in mind this very course they used to take in going to school.
This school (where Jay Gould was his playmate) he attended only until he was twelve years of age. A rather curious reciprocal help these two lads gave each other—especially curious in the light of their subsequent careers as writer and financier. The boy John Burroughs was one day feeling very uncomfortable because he could not furnish a composition required of him. Eight lines only were sufficient if the task was completed on time, but the time was up and no line was written. This meant being kept after school to write twelve lines. In this extremity. Jay Gould came to his rescue with the following doggerel:—
"Time is flying past,
Night is coming fast,
I, minus two, as you all know,
But what is more
I must hand o'er
Twelve lines by night,
Or stay and write.
Just eight I've got
But you know that's not
Enough lacking four,
But to have twelve
It wants no more."
"I have never been able to make out what the third line meant," said Mr. Burroughs. A few years later, when Jay Gould was hard up (he had left school and was making a map of Delaware County), John Burroughs helped him out by buying two old books of him, paying him eighty cents. The books were a German grammar and Gray's "Elements of Geology." The embryo financier was glad to get the cash, and the embryo writer unquestionably felt the richer in possessing the books.
Mr. Burroughs loves to look off toward Montgomery Hollow and talk of the old haunt. "I've taken many a fine string of trout from that stream," he would say. One day he and his brother Curtis and I drove over there and fished the stream, and he could hardly stay in the wagon the last half-mile. "Isn't it time to get out now, Curtis?" he fidgeted every little while. "Not yet, John,—not yet," said the more phlegmatic brother. But it was August, and although the rapid mountain brook seemed just the place for trout, the trout were not in their places. I shall long remember the enticing stream, the pretty cascades, the high shelving rocks sheltering the mossy nest of the phoebe, and the glowing masses of bee-balm blooming beside the stream; yes, and the eagerness of one of the fishermen as he slipped along ahead of me, dropping his hook into the pools. Occasionally he would relinquish the rod, putting it into my hands with a rare self-denial as we came to a promising pool; but I was more deft at gathering bee-balm than taking trout, and willingly spared the rod to the eager angler. And even he secured only two troutling to carry back in his mint-lined creel.